Silverman, Dorothy

ORAL HISTORY OF DOROTHY SILVERMAN
With husband, Meyer D. “Mike” Silverman, Ph.D.
Interviewed by Jim Kolb
February 19, 2004
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Dorothy let’s begin by you telling us about your early work experience even before you came to Oak Ridge, okay?
Mrs. Silverman: I hope my memory will hold up. I graduated University of Louisville in – when did I graduate at the University of Louisville?
Dr. Silverman: ’33.
Mrs. Silverman: That’s what I thought, 1933. I majored in French and Spanish and I couldn’t get a job teaching. And then I realized that many Ph.D.s were in the same predicament. Somewhere along the line, I had taken a course in typing and I applied – I couldn’t get any job in Louisville. I took a civil service there and I was accepted in Washington, D.C., and I worked with the Veterans Administration there. I don’t know how many years I was there. Four years – three or four years. Then I met my husband and we got married, 1940. Mike, is that it?
Dr. Silverman: What?
Mrs. Silverman: 1940? When did we get married?
Dr. Silverman: We got married September 1st, 1940.
Mrs. Silverman: Now you come down and sit next to me.
Dr. Silverman: Okay, fine.
Mr. Kolb: That’s okay. Go ahead.
Mrs. Silverman: I have a poor memory now. While we married in 1940, he was working for the Department of Agriculture, and I was working with the Veterans Administration. And then he got a job in Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland, and I followed him there and I worked in the laboratory as a secretary to a Colonel Shannon? Was that his name?
Dr. Silverman: Whatever his name was.
Mrs. Silverman: And then my husband was called. He applied for an application up in Chicago and he was referred to a little town called Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Little town.
Mrs. Silverman: And I followed him there, and I was a secretary at the Laboratory in the Chemistry Division until the war was over. Correct?
Mr. Kolb: And that was in ’43.
Dr. Silverman: We arrived in Chicago in November ’43 and a month later came down to Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: You came to Oak Ridge in ’43, then.
Dr. Silverman: December ’43.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mrs. Silverman: When the authorities found out that he had a wife who could type, what did he say? “Don’t let this man go!”
Mr. Kolb: ‘Don’t let this man go,’ just to get the woman.
Dr. Silverman: Yeah, head of research, Director of Research, Sergeant Whitaker, who was Director of the Lab, “Don’t let this man out of your sight,” when he found out she had been secretary to two patent attorneys at RCA.
Mrs. Silverman: I forgot about that.
Mr. Kolb: So for whom did you work early on at the lab?
Mrs. Silverman: I worked for the Chemistry Division.
Mr. Kolb: Chemistry Division.
Mrs. Silverman: For – is it R. Perlman?
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mrs. Silverman: Ralph Stoughton.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, Ralph Stoughton.
Mrs. Silverman: And who was the other guy?
Dr. Silverman: Spoff English.
Mrs. Silverman: Spoff English.
Mr. Kolb: Spoff English, okay.
Mrs. Silverman: And I enjoyed that work. I felt it was essential. Actually, I was very happy to be there.
Mr. Kolb: Yes.
Mrs. Silverman: Working, feeling I was useful.
Dr. Silverman: May I add an addition? Perlman was Seaborg’s right hand man. He and Seaborg left Berkeley to start the Chemistry Division in 1942 in Chicago and Dot, as Perlman’s secretary, had thirty-eight men out of the seventy in the Chemistry Division under her.
Mr. Kolb: More than half. Wow, big job. They didn’t have many secretaries, obviously.
Dr. Silverman: Three college grads they found in Oak Ridge in the Chemistry Division.
Mr. Kolb: Is that right? Wow.
Mrs. Silverman: Well after the war, nineteen –
Mr. Kolb: Let’s stick with the war, okay, let���s stick with the wartime. So you worked –
Mrs. Silverman: While in Oak Ridge, I worked six days a week. We didn’t have much time for socializing. We joined the Jewish Congregation of Oak Ridge; it was formed.
Mr. Kolb: When was that formed by the way?
Dr. Silverman: The congregation?
Mr. Kolb: Approximately.
Dr. Silverman: I don’t know. There was a pseudo congregation during the war led by a Captain Bernstein, but it wasn’t a formal congregation. I don’t know that one actually was formed till after the war. But it used the Chapel on the Hill just like every other denomination.
Mr. Kolb: Right.
Mrs. Silverman: It was interesting because each denomination brought its relics or religious objects for use and then they’d remove them and the next religion would come in the same place, the Chapel on the Hill, and take prayer; it was interesting. Working six days a week didn’t leave much time for socializing. That time – during that time – no, the orchestra wasn’t formed then. Go ahead. What was your question?
Mr. Kolb: Well I was going to ask you about the orchestra, because you were active in that, I know, early on.
Mrs. Silverman: Very [early] on. I left the lab nineteen-forty-what? Stopped working for Perlman in what? What year?
Dr. Silverman: 1943.
Mrs. Silverman: 1943, and I felt that I was finished with work. Then I was asked by a man by the name of Waldo Cohn, who was a cellist, to work for him. And in that office we formed the Symphony. Actually, I was his ���man Friday,’ and we did all, everything that pertained, calling and –
Mr. Kolb: Contacting other musicians.
Mrs. Silverman: Contacting and I have something I wrote in the newspaper, a nice clipping about him. Waldo did everything. He was a custodian. He swept the floors, moved the piano. He called his personnel man – in the orchestra – I get started on the orchestra because that’s my baby.
Mr. Kolb: That’s okay.
Mrs. Silverman: And we had both worked very hard with that. He was a librarian, he ordered music; he was everything that you have in a board.
Mr. Kolb: Yes, yes you didn’t have a board back then.
Mrs. Silverman: We did not have a board.
Mr. Kolb: Where did you practice?
Mrs. Silverman: In high school, initially, right?
Dr. Silverman: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: In the high school?
Dr. Silverman: Yeah, the old Jefferson, used to be on top of the hill, and then later it was named – it temporarily was the high school, too, until we built the new high school in ’51.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, okay, so in the original high school, okay. And how many people were involved in the early orchestra approximately?
Mrs. Silverman: We gave our first concert – [to her husband] now come on, I have days; I need you here.
Dr. Silverman: All right, a string symphonette grew out of quartets that Waldo used to hold at his house.
Mrs. Silverman: Quartets, trios, and so on.
Dr. Silverman: The first string symphonette consisted of nineteen players, gave its concert in June of ’44. Later that year, Waldo got the members of the band, Oak Ridge Community Band, wind players who were working under John Van Wazer, who had a wind ensemble, and the combination of the strings, wind ensemble and the brass from the band formed the Oak Ridge Symphony which gave its first concert in November of ’44. So we have been operating – this is our 60th year.
Mr. Kolb: Right and I think we got a picture of Waldo directing one of the early symphony – I don’t know which day it was – and I took it and had it mounted in the Welcome Center of Oak Ridge after he passed away. You helped us get that. But that was an early picture that early photographer –
Mrs. Silverman: Westcott?
Mr. Kolb: Westcott, Ed Westcott took, yes.
Mrs. Silverman: Ed Westcott – we bumped into him two weeks ago, I guess, a week ago.
Dr. Silverman: At Shoney’s, yes.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, okay, yeah.
Mrs. Silverman: He�����s still living.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, yes.
Dr. Silverman: Ed had had a stroke.
Mr. Kolb: He’s had a stroke, but he’s recovering.
Mrs. Silverman: As a matter of fact, I did everything [for Waldo Cohn]. I worked in his office. I was his secretary, and the radio isotopes, actually, first shipment of radio isotopes came out of his office. And we worked – you say somebody came in the office and said, “How do they do all this?” We had the Oak Ridge Scientific, was it? Or what was I – come on.
Dr. Silverman: Dot was secretary to the Oak Ridge Symphony. The first secretary when ORCMA was formed in 1947, she – Association of Oak Ridge Scientists and Engineers was formed to lobby – which lobbied for the Atomic Energy Commission to take –
Mr. Kolb: And she was secretary of that, too?
Dr. Silverman: She was secretary of that, too. When John Swartout and I moved into that office after Waldo went to the Biology Division, he looked at all them niches. I was doing my thesis under John Swartout, and he looked and he said, “My God, what weren’t these two up to? They did so many things.”
Mrs. Silverman: He was a hard worker. He just heard there’s going to be a big concert coming up –
Mr. Kolb: In April? The National Symphony?
Mrs. Silverman: Yes. You were aware of that.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I read about it.
Mrs. Silverman: I hope you can come.
Mr. Kolb: We’re planning on it.
Mrs. Silverman: And I think he will be honored at that time.
Mr. Kolb: Good.
Mrs. Silverman: I hope.
Mr. Kolb: Good. So you were secretary; every time you turned around, you were secretary for some organization.
Mrs. Silverman: When I retired, I said – I acted all – I had a degree for teaching, you know, so I said, “I don’t want to see another typewriter as long as I live. I won’t have it in the house.” So we – am I talking too much?
Mr. Kolb: No, you’re fine. Keep going.
Mrs. Silverman: At that time, after the war, there was a resurgence of interest in foreign languages. All our children must have this education, because it’s just the thing. So I said, oh boy, this is a good chance to get back in my language field, in my field.
Mr. Kolb: Yes.
Mrs. Silverman: So I was then asked if I would help to form this, and then I’d say, “I found I can’t do it. I’ve forgotten everything I knew,” and, you know, if you don’t use a language – well, they didn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. So several teachers and I got the foreign language – elementary school – into the program. First year we worked for nothing all year.
Mr. Kolb: Just volunteers?
Mrs. Silverman: Volunteers. In the early days, everything was volunteer.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right.
Mrs. Silverman: Volunteerism, and we finally got the program into the school system, and went to junior high, and I started off using that oral program in the high school. But that time, it had lost its – they’d lost interest in that and they lost interest in the oral part of teaching the program, really. So then you had your formal Latin, French, Spanish, the way it’s been, you know, for years.
Mr. Kolb: So you taught all those languages or just –
Mrs. Silverman: I just taught French and Spanish.
Mr. Kolb: French and Spanish, okay, yeah.
Mrs. Silverman: Then we had our little daughter, Roberta Silverman.
Mr. Kolb: Let’s go back. Who else was involved in that, in that early language –
Mrs. Silverman: It was Irene Campbell, it was Adelaide –
Dr. Silverman: Adelaide Bernstein, called them the three old musketeers. They were hired.
Mr. Kolb: I see.
Mrs. Silverman: We were fully hired. We volunteered for a whole year. It was hard work, preparing. We had no materials, and we did finally receive some materials. There was others. Bernice Lawson did the French, a few others.
Mr. Kolb: Bernice Lawson, yes, George Lawson’s wife?
Mrs. Silverman: Yes. I have forgotten their names.
Mr. Kolb: That’s fine.
Mrs. Silverman: There’s a lot of interest in that program.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, yeah. Well, let’s go back to the World War II period again. You said you were very busy working, of course, but you had –
Mrs. Silverman: I had the Symphony and tennis. We formed a –
Mr. Kolb: Oh tennis, okay, you and Mike and –
Mrs. Silverman: Oh, no, the Women’s League would – we were jealous of the men.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mrs. Silverman: So we had to have a Women’s League. There’s a picture of it in the ORNL paper. You don’t have that, do you?
Dr. Silverman: Somewhere I’ve got it in the files.
Mrs. Silverman: Of the women’s tennis team.
Mr. Kolb: Who else was on that here, involved in that?
Mrs. Silverman: He remembers.
Dr. Silverman: Let’s see –
Mrs. Silverman: Ella Lane.
Mr. Kolb: Ella Lane, Jim Lane’s wife?
Mrs. Silverman: Jim Lane’s.
Dr. Silverman: Henry Zeldes’ wife, Ann Flynn was her name, her maiden name. Whyte Gaither. Whyte, she used to work in the – in Medical Division.
Mr. Kolb: What year was this about? Still during the war?
Dr. Silverman: It started after the war.
Mr. Kolb: After the war?
Mrs. Silverman: The ladies League started after the war. The Men’s League started during the war.
Mr. Kolb: During the war, yeah, right, okay.
Mrs. Silverman: We had a sixty year –
Mr. Kolb: Anniversary?
Mrs. Silverman: Anniversary, remember, at the lab? Was it sixty years?
Dr. Silverman: Well we would, yeah the 60th year of the lab, they held a meeting.
Mrs. Silverman: I think I was the last surviving woman.
Dr. Silverman: She may be.
Mrs. Silverman: I was interviewed.
Dr. Silverman: Marilyn McLaughlin.
Mr. Kolb: Yes.
Dr. Silverman: We had a fifteen minute interview, and then we got fifteen seconds on the TV program that night.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, is that right?
Dr. Silverman: Alvin [Weinberg] got thirty seconds!
Mr. Kolb: Well, yeah, they always shorten it.
Dr. Silverman: Sound bites.
Mrs. Silverman: But the formation of the Symphony and the music has been my first love.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I bet and very successful.
Mrs. Silverman: It’s still holding up and I was a charter member of the Oak Ridge Civic Music Association, as such. I was on the first board. And, of course, guess who was secretary?
Mr. Kolb: Somebody named Dot.
Mrs. Silverman: Somebody named Dot.
Mr. Kolb: Wonderful.
Mrs. Silverman: And I worked at the – yeah, well, I enjoyed music. I taught a little bit at the same time.
Mr. Kolb: And you played in the orchestra too?
Mrs. Silverman: Oh yes, I played violin. Then I switched to viola.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, but Mike played the violin all time.
Dr. Silverman: Yeah. Dot played for fifty-one years until her eyes acted up.
Mrs. Silverman: Yeah, I’ve not played anymore. Mike, I forgot to say that I found an old, old program. It was the Louisville Philharmonic. It was the first year, and I left – and why did keep that piece of paper? Well, I saw my name on there, so you might say I was a member of the first Louisville Philharmonic when it first began.
Mr. Kolb: Really?
Mrs. Silverman: But I don’t recall playing with them. I don’t know, my name is there on the program, but everywhere I went, we’ve moved, whatever, I’ve managed to find a symphony where I could play. Washington, D.C., and –
Mr. Kolb: Wonderful.
Mrs. Silverman: Despite a handicap – I’ve always had this. I graduated high school at the age of what, Mike, fourteen?
Dr. Silverman: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Wow, my goodness.
Mrs. Silverman: At the time of graduation, just before graduation, I had an infection, and this finger was gone. I thought that was the end of my music, but nothing was going to keep me away from that.
Mr. Kolb: You kept going.
Mrs. Silverman: I kept going.
Mr. Kolb: With the rest of your fingers.
Mrs. Silverman: I never had a good vibrato, but I kept going.
Mr. Kolb: Good. That’s amazing.
Mrs. Silverman: What else Mike? [to her husband] What are you reading there? Help me out! [to the interviewer] Tell me your question, then.
Mr. Kolb: Did you participate in any other – I know you’re busy with all the music activity, but any other, like the tennis court dances and things of that nature during the war?
Mrs. Silverman: We attended one or two, right?
Dr. Silverman: Yeah.
Mrs. Silverman: Ed Pollock?
Dr. Silverman: Bill Pollock.
Mrs. Silverman: Got on the tennis court? Bill Pollock, Bill Pollock. I was a member of – [to her husband] where are those pic – there you are. Let me have those things over here. [to the interviewer] Oak Ridge Civic Music Association Guild, we still are active members, we – a program chairman of that for years. [to her husband] Let me have those things. That will remind me. What’s that?
Dr. Silverman: This plaque was given, Jim, and Dot was selected as one of ten women in Oak Ridge and down at the bottom, that last paragraph, you’ll see, they go over her dossier and, turn over –
Mr. Kolb: This was by the Association of University Women, right?
Dr. Silverman: Right.
Mrs. Silverman: Yeah, right.
Mr. Kolb: AA –
Mrs. Silverman: – UW.
Mr. Kolb: UW, right. Yeah, well, it’s an impressive dossier, as you say, all the symphonies she belonged to and people she worked with and for, my goodness.
Mrs. Silverman: I didn’t tell – in the war, I played with Washington Civic Symphony too. Wherever I went, I managed to find an orchestra. I was born in Bellingham, Washington. Did I tell you?
Mr. Kolb: Oh you were?
Mrs. Silverman: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: No. Way out near Seattle?
Mrs. Silverman: My father had pulpits in, oh, well, El Paso, Texas, Tucson, Arizona. I feel that I was –
Mr. Kolb: You traveled widely as a child, too, you didn’t –
Mrs. Silverman: Minister’s kids, I was pretty good, though, for a minister’s kid. I was too busy.
Mr. Kolb: They always have a reputation of being wild but I don’t know why that is – because they’ve been so repressed by their parents.
Mrs. Silverman: They were very proud of me; they did me a justice. Anyway, I had three brothers. One was in business; another was an attorney in Louisville, Kentucky. He was made a Colonel by – what’s his name?
Dr. Silverman: Happy Chandler.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, an honorary Colonel of Kentucky?
Mrs. Silverman: Yes, Herman Cohen, C-O-H-E-N, and then my younger brother was a pediatrician and he served in World War I and so he was –
Dr. Silverman: He was a flight surgeon.
Mrs. Silverman: Flight surgeon.
Dr. Silverman: They serviced the Southeast Pacific.
Mrs. Silverman: He was deaf as a result of being up in the – but his wife was his ears, and that kept him in active practice.
Mr. Kolb: Good.
Mrs. Silverman: What else, dear boy?
Mr. Kolb: Well, let’s go back to the wartime. Did the fact that you lived in a secret city behind fences bother you or what did you –
Mrs. Silverman: No, I was proud.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, you were proud.
Mrs. Silverman: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mrs. Silverman: I was very proud of what we were doing. Really I’m against war, but I was very proud of what we were doing. His folks live up in Connecticut and we go drive up there, over twelve hours to get up there and, “What are you doing down there in the sticks?”
Mr. Kolb: Tennessee, yeah.
Mrs. Silverman: “We can’t tell you. After the war’s over, we’ll tell you.” And we were on our way back one year, and the bomb was dropped. Remember that phone – you went to the phone, made a call to your folks and told them, “Now you know what” –
Mr. Kolb: Oh, I see.
Dr. Silverman: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: After the first bomb was dropped?
Dr. Silverman: Yeah, the announcement came over the radio. I said to my mother, “Now you know why we’re down there in Tennessee.” The following day, driving back to Oak Ridge from New York, we stopped outside of Washington and picked up the Washington Post, and there was the big headline.
Mr. Kolb: Saying ‘Atomic Bomb’?
Dr. Silverman: “Atomic bomb dropped on Japan,” first one.
Mr. Kolb: Where were you when you first heard the news, Mrs. Silverman. Were you at work?
Mrs. Silverman: In a car, we were driving back to – we were on vacation, weren’t we?
Dr. Silverman: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Oh you heard it on the radio?
Mrs. Silverman: Yeah.
Dr. Silverman: Right.
Mr. Kolb: You weren’t here, you were actually traveling.
Mrs. Silverman: Returning.
Dr. Silverman: We were in New York at the time.
Mr. Kolb: I see, okay.
Mrs. Silverman: It wasn’t New York. We were there in Connecticut.
Dr. Silverman: No, no, at that time my mother was in New York for a couple of years. My dad had taken a position in New York.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mrs. Silverman: Okay.
Mr. Kolb: So you heard on the radio, all this?
Dr. Silverman: Right.
Mr. Kolb: Well, that��s interesting. So you didn’t get –
Mrs. Silverman: It was a well-kept secret, no doubt about it.
Mr. Kolb: Did you know about the secret service being around and prowling around in – ear to the ground?
Mrs. Silverman: No, we never heard of that. We were too busy to pay attention to that. Oh, I’ll tell you something very funny.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mrs. Silverman: [to her husband] You help me out on this.
Dr. Silverman: Okay.
Mrs. Silverman: This was on a Saturday; I think it was. The World Series was on. I was typing furiously. This was during the war, with one report after another chasing around. Cas Borkowsky – was head of the Instrument Division – had some boys of his come down and fit me up with earplugs and a radio. This was Saturday, the World Series is on, and I’m typing furiously to get one report out after another, and the phone would ring, SCORE! – And who was that? I don’t know who – hadn’t the slightest idea who was – you know who was playing?
Dr. Silverman: Who was playing then?
Mrs. Silverman: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: So they called up on the phone to ask you the score?
Mrs. Silverman: Ah, that’s just full of – and I didn’t know one thing from another about baseball, but that was morale, you know.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, sure, contact with –
Mrs. Silverman: I thought that was part of my duty to keep the boys happy.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, my goodness.
Dr. Silverman: The radio was up in the attic, and the wires led down to her office.
Mr. Kolb: My goodness.
Mrs. Silverman: That’s the way the score is –
Dr. Silverman: Cas had a bunch of crackerjacks.
Mr. Kolb: Was it not legal to have a radio in the lab at that time?
Dr. Silverman: I don’t know.
Mr. Kolb: Because I don’t recall. Well it’s –
Mrs. Silverman: Well, Cas is not living anymore.
Mr. Kolb: No, that’s right.
Mrs. Silverman: Dandl, he’s out in California.
Mr. Kolb: Oh yeah, Ray Dandl?
Dr. Silverman: Ray Dandl, [inaudible] was in it, in the SED at that time; he worked in that group. Let���s see, trying to think of –
Mr. Kolb: I’m sure you had lots of interesting anecdotes to tell about the lives of all these people that you interacted with.
Mrs. Silverman: Oh, yes. Oh, the parties we gave. We were married when we arrived in Oak Ridge, so we had picked the furniture, some furniture from Edgewood Arsenal, remember? And we had a grand piano didn’t we?
Dr. Silverman: No, we didn’t get that until after the war, in Louisville.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Dr. Silverman: We had the –
Mrs. Silverman: No, wait a minute – we gave parties with piano; Alvin Weinberg came over and played on the piano.
Dr. Silverman: Well, that was after the war.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Dr. Silverman: We were in an “A” house on Kingfisher Lane, and we were one of the few people who had good furniture, which we had purchased while we were working at Edgewood Arsenal, and we had that furniture delivered to Oak Ridge when we came down from Chicago. I also had a B ration card because I had been working for the Permutit Water Conditioning Corporation in southern New Jersey and had to travel twenty-five miles to work and was working on a couple of important war projects.
Mr. Kolb: So you had a better than average gasoline ration card.
Dr. Silverman: Right. That ration card helped us go back and forth for the first three months from Knoxville to Oak Ridge until we obtained permanent housing in Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, before you lived in Oak Ridge, I see.
Dr. Silverman: And it also enabled us to take three or four single men with us on Monday nights into Knoxville to shop at Millers and get a good meal.
Mrs. Silverman: You’ve heard the word ‘pukatorium’?
Mr. Kolb: No, I haven’t.
Dr. Silverman: That was the nickname for the Central Cafeteria on –
Mr. Kolb: What do you call it?
Dr. Silverman: The pukatorium.
Mr. Kolb: The pukatorium, oh, wow, that’s pretty gross.
Dr. Silverman: Yeah.
Mrs. Silverman: That was one of the names for the place.
Mr. Kolb: It was the mass production –
Dr. Silverman: It was the cafeteria on Central Avenue, near Jackson Square.
Mrs. Silverman: We were glad to have it though, Mike, don’t forget that.
Mr. Kolb: Well, talking about Knoxville, were you treated okay by these merchants there and when you shopped?
Dr. Silverman: Well we were foreigners as they’d say.
Mr. Kolb: But let her tell it. Yeah, go ahead. What do you think, Dot?
Mrs. Silverman: We didn’t spend too much time there, but I did feel that they didn’t know what we were doing there and why and what for. I didn’t understand some of the language, the ‘poke,’ “Do you want a poke?”
Mr. Kolb: Oh, I see, the language.
Mrs. Silverman: A few little things like that. We were too busy, really, to – they did resent that. You had a feeling that we shouldn’t be there. I mean, what are we doing? We couldn’t say why we were there.
Mr. Kolb: Exactly. But they liked your money, I assume.
Mrs. Silverman: Absolutely. But it was a great experience. I wouldn’t – it was a great experience of our lives. I mean, you felt it was worthwhile.
Mr. Kolb: Oh yeah, even though it was wartime as you say, it was kind of a negative thing, but yet it turned out to be a positive thing.
Mrs. Silverman: Do you have that book, Mike? Seaborg?
Dr. Silverman: Yeah.
Mrs. Silverman: I feel very honored. I’m going to tell this story. Mike and I were having supper, I guess it was, I was across this kitchen there, talking, busy, and the phone rang and I [phone rings] – like this, see?
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: A resolution by the House of Representatives of the State, honoring you, Mrs. Silverman, and Waldo Cohn and Jacinta Howard?
Mrs. Silverman: Weren’t you on this thing, Mike?
Mr. Kolb: And Meyer, yeah, Mike or Meyer, as you were formerly called, Silverman, back – this was done in –
Dr. Silverman: 1994.
Mr. Kolb: 1994.
Dr. Silverman: At the 50th anniversary of the formation of the Symphony.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, I see, that’s right. This is on January 29th of 1994, Orchestra’s Founders Day, wonderful. Jimmy Nassif. He’s still – I think he’s still in the House. Or if he’s not, he had been till recently.
Dr. Silverman: McNally is still in the Senate.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, Ned McWherter was Governor.
Mrs. Silverman: Yeah.
Dr. Silverman: And, of course, Dave Coffey –
Mr. Kolb: Dave Coffey was –
Dr. Silverman: Retired from the – he didn’t run again.
Mr. Kolb: Right, well, you worked hard and you did have some recognition.
Dr. Silverman: Yes, we did.
Mr. Kolb: Maybe late, but at least it had happened.
Mrs. Silverman: One night we were having supper, in the kitchen –
Mr. Kolb: That’s right. You were talking about that.
Mrs. Silverman: And the phone rang, and I recognized – he said, “This is Glenn Seaborg.”
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my goodness.
Mrs. Silverman: I said, “Who?” I was going to give him a wisecrack, you know, something like, “Well this is Hillary Clinton,” but then I thought twice. I said, “Oh, you want to speak to Mike Silverman.” And I quickly handed the phone to Mike, Meyer, and he said, “Oh, no, no,” “Who you talking to?”
Dr. Silverman: Yeah, “I want to speak to Dorothy.”
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mrs. Silverman: So, he wanted something in my background. Like he wanted a little of that and he wanted it for his book. Are you aware of this book of his?
Mr. Kolb: Yes.
Dr. Silverman: The Plutonium Story, the journals from ’39, the discovery of Plutonium till 1946 when he and Pullman went back to Berkeley to teach again and do research, and her bio is in here as a secretary to –
Mrs. Silverman: This is a very distinguished bio, but he wanted it.
Dr. Silverman: You know, educated, born, so and so, was educated at the University of Louisville, a B.A. in Spanish and French.
Mrs. Silverman: Well show it to him, Honey, he might pick up a few things that you’re not –
Dr. Silverman: Well, it’s just – here, right at the top –
Mrs. Silverman: Up there somewhere. I can’t read anymore. My eye – I have macular [degeneration].
Mr. Kolb: So this was during the war that he called you, I take it.
Dr. Silverman: No, no. This was in the mid ’90s.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, when he was writing his –
Dr. Silverman: Yeah, this book came out about – oh, I don’t know, about six or seven years ago.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, it was much later, right.
Mrs. Silverman: But I didn’t think he even knew I existed. Apparently –
Mr. Kolb: Well, he obviously did.
Mrs. Silverman: Obviously he did.
Mr. Kolb: He remembered your importance, that’s right. That’s wonderful.
Mrs. Silverman: Yeah, I’m honored. I’m really honored.
Dr. Silverman: See, on the left, Jim, is the organization of Perlman’s section, you see. Seaborg has in that book everybody he came into contact with on the project that was in any way connected with the work there that he had anything to do with and there��s a bio of every one of the so called “wheels” on the project, with the discussions of meetings that were held with family, tell them what to do after the war, so forth. So that’s – you see, that’s about a thousand page book and I went back and learned a lot of actinide chemistry as a result of reading that.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I bet, because he didn’t leave anything out, did he.
Mrs. Silverman: Were you a chemist or what?
Mr. Kolb: No, I was an engineer. Right. Worked with chemists.
Mrs. Silverman: You knew Jacinta Howard, or your mother?
Mr. Kolb: Well, my mother, yeah. I mean, I met her through my parents who lived in the same Garden Apartments.
Mrs. Silverman: Wonderful gal.
Mr. Kolb: Back in the ’80’s, yes.
Mrs. Silverman: We miss her. Her son, by the way, Tom – I better check on those fiddles.
Dr. Silverman: Oh yeah, her son, Tom, teaches at Savannah College.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Dr. Silverman: And so he was here when Jacinta passed away a year and a half ago. We participated in the service.
Mrs. Silverman: Is this being recorded?
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, it’s okay, that’s fine. Well, another honor. That’s great. Dr. Seaborg was – had a good memory and was smart enough to talk to the people that were really [inaudible].
Mrs. Silverman: He was little, or small as I was. I felt I was very honored.
Mr. Kolb: Why certainly. You know, I had many secretaries in my work experience, and they were really workhorses back before you got computers and did a lot of your own writing.
Mrs. Silverman: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: And they were the key, the hub of the offices you might say, because if anything went wrong, your secretary always had to take the brunt for it, because they were involved in everything, you know.
Dr. Silverman: Well, Jim, to tell about the reasons that Seaborg would come down to Oak Ridge every month, sometimes more often during the processing stage when Clinton Labs was developing the plutonium separation process to discuss with Perlman how they were getting along, because we were the pilot plant for Hanford, and Dot would see Seaborg, six-foot-six, and Perlman, five-foot-four, walking down the hall together, and see, Ward would stop at the office and see her and so he was well acquainted with Dot.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah another eminent scientist of that era from the Met [Metallurgical] Lab in Chicago was Dr. Arthur Compton.
Mrs. Silverman: Oh, yes.
Mr. Kolb: Did you have any interaction with him? Of course, he was on the physics side.
Mrs. Silverman: No, no I didn’t.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mrs. Silverman: But Alvin Weinberg has been a good close friend of ours, so he’s the physics side.
Mr. Kolb: But Compton and his wife lived here for a while.
Dr. Silverman: Oh, yes.
Mr. Kolb: They had a temporary home because his primary residence was – I guess, was up in the Chicago area.
Dr. Silverman: Oh yes, and they were under pseudo names.
Mr. Kolb: Is that right?
Dr. Silverman: Oh yes.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Dr. Silverman: Their names were disguised.
Mr. Kolb: I see. I didn’t know that.
Dr. Silverman: And when there was a reception or party at the Ridge Rec Hall, nothing but the best brands of liquor were out there. Whereas we lowly civilians were told to avoid trying to bring anything into the area.
Mr. Kolb: Now let���s talk about that a little bit. That is a really another novel part of Oak Ridge, the dry county and how liquor was brought in.
Mrs. Silverman: Well one of the officers – you have this down – my brother was an attorney up in Louisville, Kentucky and that’s close by, but at that time, it took about seven or eight hours to drive. Today you’d do it in, what, four hours? Before we left, he had a few bottles to give us, choice Kentucky Bourbon, and how were we going to get it through the lines? Well, one time, I don’t remember all that stuff, I had a box of Kotex. We hid it in there. Very, very –
Dr. Silverman: Hid it in a sack of potatoes.
Mr. Kolb: Smuggled it in through –
Dr. Silverman: Oh, the ultimate, though, was when we didn’t drive up but took the train to Louisville, came back – you had to make arrangements beforehand to make sure that there was to be a stop at Edgemoor or Elza Gate on the L&N. The spur went to Louisville, the main line came down from Cincinnati, and we had notified them ahead of time when we bought our tickets that we were required to stop at Edgemoor. On the train were several officers, and we overheard them speaking and they were talking about how were they were going to get the train stopped. They spoke to the conductor and we overheard the conversation. He said, “Do you have any advance notification or did you make arrangements?” They said, “No.” “Well then I can’t stop the train for you.” And then along come these two civilians who get the train stopped at Edgemoor. When we made the stop and got off, the officers asked, “How are you going to get into Oak Ridge?” We remarked, “There’s a bus that comes by every thirty minutes from Knoxville and will take us into Oak Ridge,����� and they said, “Don’t you worry.” Army car came and took us, liquor and all, right up to our doorstep on Kingfisher Lane.
Mr. Kolb: So you were the ones that got the train stopped?
Dr. Silverman: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, so how did you arrange that?
Dr. Silverman: We notified the office at the L&N when we bought our tickets. You had to notify them ahead of time that you were going to get off at this place.
Mr. Kolb: Normally didn’t stop there?
Dr. Silverman: Normally it didn’t stop, you see.
Mr. Kolb: I see. Okay.
Mrs. Silverman: Speaking of Louisville, Kentucky, we went to the Kentucky Derby and [there were] signs all around: watch your wallet. So I kept reminding him, very knowingly, “Where’s your wallet? Watch your wallet.” By the time we were due to leave and return, guess whose wallet was taken.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, no, yours?
Mrs. Silverman: Mine.
Dr. Silverman: Yeah, she lost her badge.
Mrs. Silverman: I had everything in it.
Dr. Silverman: And we got a lecture from Lowery Rearden, Head of Security.
Mrs. Silverman: Well, anyway, how did I get by? I don’t know.
Mr. Kolb: Was this during the war or after?
Dr. Silverman: During the war, this was in – a Kentucky Derby, Spring of ’45.
Mrs. Silverman: How did I get by?
Dr. Silverman: Well, when we got to the lab, I had a badge and –
Mrs. Silverman: Whatever.
Mr. Kolb: But it was temporary. I’m sure you’re not the first person to lose your badge or misplace it, but, you know, it was not desired.
Dr. Silverman: And there was Bill Knox. We’d see him in the cafeteria line, and in his hip pocket was a bottle of Retonga cough syrup, because it was almost like fifty percent alcohol.
Mrs. Silverman: I mean, we’d go to parties at the Ridge Hall, and I’d be talking, I’d have a glass out there, and every time I took a sip, it was filled to the top. I mean, it was flowing.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, the people knew how to get it, and, of course, bootlegging was going on.
Dr. Silverman: Oh, yes, white lighting.
Mr. Kolb: And I guess there was a source just not very far out of Oak Ridge in Roane County?
Dr. Silverman: Oh, in Morgan County, The Owl was right on the borderline between Roane and Morgan County.
Mr. Kolb: I see, was it in Morgan County though?
Dr. Silverman: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: And that was wet?
Dr. Silverman: That was wet.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, okay, and people went there?
Dr. Silverman: That’s unusual.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I didn’t know that. It wasn’t that far away, then, that you could go to that place.
Mrs. Silverman: So you were born where, Wisconsin?
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Dot, go ahead.
Mrs. Silverman: We are on what, eighty-nine. In June, I will be ninety, if I live that long. But we are very active. We belong in clubs. And we go – “Are you ever home?” “No.” We’re at a meeting or we’re attending classes at Roane State.
Mr. Kolb: ORICL.
Mrs. Silverman: ORICL, and we keep very busy. He plays in two symphony orchestras. He is on the board. I mean it’s great, isn’t it, for a small town, you know.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right, small city.
Mrs. Silverman: Small city. We know a lot of people. You can just walk along the street there and “Hi Joe,” “Hi Dot,” and do whatever. It’s a feeling you don’t get in a big city. So when my nephew said, “How can you stand a small town?” I could not even begin to tell him. I love every minute I was here.
Mr. Kolb: And you still do.
Mrs. Silverman: And I still do. I love the people. [referring to something outside] In the front, in the woods, look out there. You know what you pay for a view like this up in New York or somewhere?
Mr. Kolb: It doesn’t exist.
Mrs. Silverman: It doesn’t exist.
Mr. Kolb: You gotta go up in the Poconos or whatever.
Mrs. Silverman: We have it right here, and, you know, we’re not wealthy, just like any scientist, but we have the wealth. I mean, we just love it here. We have friends, people.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, Oak Ridgers don’t leave very much, do they? They retire and they stick around, pretty much.
Mrs. Silverman: We know what we have.
Dr. Silverman: What we have, Jim, are snowbirds. We can see it in the membership of the ORCMA members, who are gone for a couple months during the winter to Florida, to Arizona and then –
Mr. Kolb: But they’re still Oak Ridgers, I mean –
Dr. Silverman: Oh, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: – for a time, yeah.
Dr. Silverman: Yeah, June Adamson wrote something that I think could be said, “In another incarnation, Dorothy Silverman would undoubtedly be producing major musical events in a large city. Fortunately, Oak Ridgers had the benefit of her talent with a whole half century of its existence, albeit she has never received deserved recognition. And members of the ORCMA guild, as it is informally known, agreed unanimously that she is its first, most worthy contributor, not only towards purposes of programming but to the planning of musical events for all of Oak Ridge from 1943 to 1993. Therefore, she is a person nominated for the prestigious AAUW Woman of Impact Award.”
Mr. Kolb: And she got it.
Mrs. Silverman: Thank you, Honey.
Mr. Kolb: Wonderful. Let me ask, speaking of music, did you participate at all in the Playhouse musicals?
Mrs. Silverman: No.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mrs. Silverman: They were very busy with that.
Mr. Kolb: Did you attend the Playhouse?
Mrs. Silverman: Oh, yes. Certainly they needed – any cultural organization, we’re right there. I ran the Coffee Concerts on a Sunday night. Do you know what those are?
Mr. Kolb: Oh, sure.
Mrs. Silverman: You didn’t have to pay any money, just go there and relax for a couple of hours Sunday evening and meet people, socialize. Well anyway, that says it all; I was just active in anything musical, and I was there.
Mr. Kolb: Did your daughter begrudge the time that you were spending in all these organizations?
Mrs. Silverman: That’s another story. She played cello, and she’s now married, lovely girl. And she played in that Nashville Symphony for about, what, eight years?
Dr. Silverman: Right.
Mrs. Silverman: She has five boys, and her husband’s an architect, Alex. Her name is – Bobbie, we call her, Roberta Limor, L-I-M-O-R, and they’re in Nashville. We see them frequently.
Mr. Kolb: That’s good
[Side B]
Dr. Silverman: What month was it? Because –
Mr. Kolb: I don’t know.
Dr. Silverman: Because we were driving out west.
Mrs. Silverman: No, I wasn’t. I knew about – but I was too busy with something or other.
Mr. Kolb: I understand there was a referendum taken before that and the locals turned it down; they didn’t want the gates to be opened and the fences to be taken down.
Dr. Silverman: Could be.
Mr. Kolb: Initially.
Dr. Silverman: I vaguely remember something like that.
Mrs. Silverman: I wasn’t political in that sense of the word – League of Women Voters – but I was too busy to –
Mr. Kolb: Well, you belonged to the League of Women Voters too, way back then?
Mrs. Silverman: Way back.
Mr. Kolb: Well that was a unique experience of this town wanting to keep its, not secretness, but kind of isolation.
Mrs. Silverman: We still feel that way. Do you know, have you encountered people – we like to keep our town this size.
Mr. Kolb: Oh yeah, sure.
Mrs. Silverman: But, you know, it has to have money to exist.
Mr. Kolb: I was told by somebody that one of the reasons that the Knoxvillians didn’t like us was because we had to have our own Symphony. We had to have our own Playhouse. Why didn’t we come over there and use theirs?
Mrs. Silverman: Well we do go there, too.
Mr. Kolb: Well, I mean early on. Why did we start our own? Why didn’t we just come over there? They kind of were jealous of the fact we had our own, you know, that was part of the –
Dr. Silverman: But actually, after the war when Van Vactor came to University of Tennessee to start a fine arts program, UT did not have a music program –
Mr. Kolb: Oh, they didn’t have it?
Dr. Silverman: Nor an arts program, no, and so Dave, as the conductor of the Knoxville Symphony, reorganized it, and not having enough musicians for a full symphony, combined with Oak Ridge, the best musicians from Oak Ridge, and for four or five years, one concert was performed in Oak Ridge, the following night in Knoxville, by combining both orchestras.
Mr. Kolb: I see.
Dr. Silverman: You see?
Mr. Kolb: So they pooled the talent.
Dr. Silverman: Right, until UT started building up its music department and getting more musicians.
Mrs. Silverman: Right at this point, Oak Ridge Symphony is having a bit of problems. It’s lost a lot of members and –
Mr. Kolb: What era are we talking about? Is this after the war?
Mrs. Silverman: Now. We’re talking about now.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, now, I’m sorry.
Mrs. Silverman: People don’t have jobs; people are getting old, dying away.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, okay.
Mrs. Silverman: We’re at a very low ebb right now. Hopefully, we can’t go much lower; we will start picking up somewhere.
Mr. Kolb: I wasn’t aware of that.
Dr. Silverman: Well, the orchestra is now eighty-five to ninety percent professional. Most of the musicians come in from Knoxville, which makes for a very difficult scheduling program since the KSO does a lot of series, pop series.
Mrs. Silverman: Well, that’s not the problem, Michael, we just don’t have the money anymore.
Mr. Kolb: We’re paying more – more cost to do them.
Dr. Silverman: Right. Well, we don’t have enough local musicians of the caliber to play a large symphony program.
Mr. Kolb: It’s a big change, not like it used to be.
Mrs. Silverman: The Art Center is getting along pretty well, as far as I know. The Playhouse is doing all right. We’ll pick up. I mean, we’ve had experiences, but we’ll pick up.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah.
Dr. Silverman: There was one other problem years ago when our daughter was growing up. There were a number of talented high school students who could play in the Symphony, but with the advent of the Knoxville Youth Symphony, a number of the talented Oak Ridge High School players go into Knoxville to play in the Knoxville Youth Symphony.
Mrs. Silverman: Honey, you’re going into detail.
Mr. Kolb: That’s okay go ahead.
Dr. Silverman: So we do not have that type of personnel available.
Mrs. Silverman: Do you have any suggestions? We���re open.
Mr. Kolb: I wasn’t aware of the problem until you just brought it up. I mean, it’s just something I wasn’t aware of, but I can understand that it would be a problem.
Mrs. Silverman: But that quotation you started in your – “this man who came and saw the grassroots,” what’s his name?
Dr. Silverman: In 1947, Waldo Cohn invited a man by the name of Hans Heinsheimer, who had been the director for the biggest music publishing house in Vienna in Europe. Heinsheimer later came to the United States before the Nazis could catch up with him, and he became associated with Boosey & Hawkes and G. Sherman, the best two publishing houses in the United States, and he wrote a book called, Menagerie in F Sharp. He made the statement, he wanted to come to Oak Ridge to see a town where culture came from the bottoms up, not other towns where visiting artists came in, performed, got paid, maybe a reception and disappeared with a fee, and that was all the town had, you see. And so he wanted to see a town like Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: With grassroots.
Dr. Silverman: Culture.
Mr. Kolb: Culture, yeah. Well that’s been, obviously a hard thing to maintain but they had a broad base, and it still is there.
Mrs. Silverman: I’ll tell you something funny. I don’t know if you’re recording this.
Mr. Kolb: Sure.
Mrs. Silverman: I wrote a little note. I didn’t like what was written by somebody, and I was trying to bring out a point. Waldo Cohn was a custodian. He swept the floors. He moved the pianos. He dusted and he moved the chairs around – that’s ordinarily done by someone else – and he was a reviewer. On occasion, he reviewed his own programs for the paper, newspaper.
Mr. Kolb: Oh wrote the reviews, I see.
Mrs. Silverman: He was a librarian. He ordered music. He was a personnel person; he called out. Now these jobs are performed by the Board, usually, from the personnel director down. He did everything. He called and cajoled people to come to play in the Symphony. “Oh, I haven���t played in years,” “Oh, well, you can. Dust up the violin and come.” He did everything.
Dr. Silverman: And he’d wait and turn on the lights.
Mrs. Silverman: Oh, let me tell this – wait a minute, yeah. He was in the side of the stage – his wife was there, Charmian – and was sweating and all that stuff. So he finally put on his coat, tuxedo jacket, and Charmian wiped him, dusted off, combed his hair, and peaked out and see if the audience was ready, and he would draw the curtain, walk out the stage as if –
Mr. Kolb: Everything’s normal.
Mrs. Silverman: Didn’t have anything to do, and smiled and picked up his –
Mr. Kolb: Now, was he a conductor before?
Mrs. Silverman: No.
Mr. Kolb: He just sort of did it?
Dr. Silverman: No experience. He just studied scores. We were neighbors, right next door, and Charmian used to complain to Dot –
Mrs. Silverman: To me.
Dr. Silverman: – “You see more of him than I do,” because he’d come home, have dinner, and spend time studying musical scores and all.
Mrs. Silverman: He never studied a score; he was in music, you know, he studied his own cello part, so he was prepared. Oh, he was a hard worker. And if he needed somebody, like a cymbalist, and you weren’t doing anything and he knew you, he would say, “Jim I need you,” and he’d give you a bunch of cymbals. You’d tell him, “I don’t know what to do.” “I’ll cue you in.”
Mr. Kolb: He’ll teach you.
Mrs. Silverman: And when he was ready, remember? He pointed his finger, you know.
Dr. Silverman: Henri Levy.
Mrs. Silverman: And the guy froze. We just won’t forget that. It was the – we’re waiting for him.
Mr. Kolb: Cymbal crash.
Mrs. Silverman: Nothing. And this guy was head of a section, brilliant.
Mr. Kolb: Henri Levy?
Mrs. Silverman: Yeah.
Dr. Silverman: Henri, very quiet.
Mrs. Silverman: But he could show, I mean he just made you come in, and he built that thing up. He deserves every bit of credit, I think, that you can give him, and it made a great difference in this town and to us.
Mr. Kolb: Wasn’t he also on the School Board early on?
Dr. Silverman: He was on the School Board.
Mr. Kolb: And he tried to push the integration.
Dr. Silverman: And he also was on the Advisory Town Council that recommended integration of the school system when Brown v. Roote [Brown v. Board of Education] was approved by the Supreme Court.
Mr. Kolb: I thought he was involved in that, yeah.
Dr. Silverman: Yeah, and there was a recall election, but they didn’t get a two-thirds vote, and later he resigned from the town council.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah.
Mrs. Silverman: He got some threatening phone calls, Charmian told me, in the middle of the night.
Mr. Kolb: It was an interesting time, a transition of sorts, you know. It happened, but it took somebody to step out and take the lead, and he’s another leader there, yeah. So it was not a musical talent he had, but I guess he realized the importance of public education.
Dr. Silverman: Oh yeah.
Mr. Kolb: For everyone, yeah. Well as you say –
Mrs. Silverman: Yeah, I’m sorry you missed – couldn’t talk to him. He was very –
Mr. Kolb: Well, I knew of him, I didn’t know him personally, you know, I saw him in the Symphony.
Mrs. Silverman: But he was very much a part of this town, and helped make this town what it is.
Mr. Kolb: Well there are a lot of people that did.
Mrs. Silverman: This guy over here was a good tennis player. He was busy organizing teams, leagues.
Mr. Kolb: I know. I’ve interviewed him, so I know a little bit about him. Plus I played in a tennis league for many years.
Mrs. Silverman: Oh, did you, now?
Mr. Kolb: Oh, yeah, I played until 1994 when I retired.
Mrs. Silverman: Were you a good player?
Mr. Kolb: No, no, I’m just an average player.
Mrs. Silverman: Enjoyed it though.
Mr. Kolb: I’ve just enjoyed it, yeah.
[Break in tape]
Mrs. Silverman: Stimulating, wonderful experience. And always, “What are you doing down in that little ole town there?” “Can’t tell you. We can’t tell you.”
Mr. Kolb: So you have relatives, but the people that you know outside Oak Ridge do they know much about Oak Ridge now?
Mrs. Silverman: Not really, but you can’t miss the Manhattan Project. The scientists would know, but most people don’t know.
Dr. Silverman: Dot, do you remember after you got that call from Seaborg – Dot, excited, got on phone and called our daughter.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I bet.
Dr. Silverman: And she said to Bobbie, “Do you know who called me?”
Mrs. Silverman: No.
Dr. Silverman: And she said, “Seaborg.” “Glenn, who?”
Mr. Kolb: She wasn’t aware of Glenn Seaborg?
Mrs. Silverman: And I – took all of the – deflated me.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my. Whatever happened to Perlman? He didn’t stay here did he?
Dr. Silverman: No, he went back. Oh, DuPont used him as a consultant, and so he left in early ’45 for Hanford and served as a consultant out in Hanford, of DuPont.
Mr. Kolb: Did he move out there then?
Dr. Silverman: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: I see.
Dr. Silverman: Yes, and then he went back to the project in Chicago and then in ’46, he and Seaborg went back to California, and when he left in early ’45, Spoff English – and Spoff became, later, director of research for the AEC after the war. Uniquely, Dot was a smoker at that time.
Mrs. Silverman: I caused his demise, didn’t I? I used to bring back cigarettes.
Dr. Silverman: It was Spoff who was a steady Camel smoker. We would bring back packs of Camels from Knoxville for Spoff.
Mrs. Silverman: If I knew then what we know now.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, a big transition, it’s amazing, yeah.
Mrs. Silverman: There was Harrison Brown, also was there.
Mr. Kolb: I thought cigarettes were very plentiful during the war. The Army pushed it on the servicemen, didn’t they?
Dr. Silverman: Well on its soldiers, but not to civilians.
Mr. Kolb: You had to pay, yeah.
Dr. Silverman: Usually on Sunday mornings, there was a long line extending out from the Jackson Square Pharmacy up towards the Chapel on the Hill, and when you got in line, you didn’t know what you were getting in line for. It was either cigarettes or, for the women, nylon stockings.
Mr. Kolb: I see.
Mrs. Silverman: You heard the story of the church, the little white church there at Jackson Square?
Mr. Kolb: You mean the Chapel on the Hill?
Mrs. Silverman: Chapel on the Hill. I’m sure that somebody told you.
Mr. Kolb: Go ahead.
Mrs. Silverman: Each one would bring, each religious person or whoever would bring the objects relative to their belief. You know, candles or whatever. And then they’d leave and then the other group would come in, bring in theirs. And it epitomized to me, I said, this is the way religion should be. It should bring people together under one canopy and not divided, and be so divisive. But it was a beautiful – it was like a symphony with many movements in the symphony, you know, and with this sect coming in with theirs and leaving and then the Catholic coming, the Jewish coming in, and Episcopal coming third.
Mr. Kolb: In their common meeting place.
Mrs. Silverman: Common meeting place, common – you know, we had one thing in common, was whatever.
Dr. Silverman: I don’t know when the first actual church, independent church was built –
Mrs. Silverman: Well did you know –
Dr. Silverman: – the Jewish synagogue was built in ’51.
Mrs. Silverman: Which one?
Dr. Silverman: When the first actual private church was built other than the Chapel on the Hill.
Mrs. Silverman: Which one was it?
Dr. Silverman: I don’t know.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I don’t know either. Many churches had their 50th anniversaries years ago, so I don’t know which is the first, offhand.
Mrs. Silverman: Well, these scientists, they might not have been very, very religious but deep, deep down they were.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, a lot of people, they were; that’s for sure. Well that’s wonderful. Well, any other unique experiences you want to add to your dossier here?
Mrs. Silverman: When I was running the – I had a nice experience. I was running the musicals, small musical sessions. I brought in a boy by the name Samuel Sanders. He was how old when he came here?
Dr. Silverman: Samuel Sanders was the younger brother of a woman named Marjorie Visner. V-I-S-N-E-R. Her husband Sid worked at K-25 and then at the Lab. He was a physicist in the early ’50s. And he had been a blue baby.
Mrs. Silverman: This little boy.
Dr. Silverman: At age twelve, Dot put him on in a Coffee Concert and we packed the six hundred seat Jefferson auditorium.
Mr. Kolb: What were you playing?
Mrs. Silverman: Piano.
Dr. Silverman: Piano.
Mrs. Silverman: Played the Rachmaninoff, was it?
Dr. Silverman: No, no that was a coffee concert, later –
Mrs. Silverman: Well, anyway –
Dr. Silverman: – in 1953, the Symphony brought him back at age sixteen as a soloist to play the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto. He had had an operation for the blue baby business. He became the most known or well-known accompanist for all the big name artists – for Itzhak Perlman, for Pinchas Zukerman, for Stern, and he died at the age of sixty out of heart trouble. He had had a heart transplant in later years, and we saw him on CBS Sunday Morning a year or so before he died.
Mrs. Silverman: I was trying to communicate with him, and I didn’t quite make it.
Mr. Kolb: He was a very successful pianist.
Dr. Silverman: Yeah, oh yes.
Mr. Kolb: You mentioned Itzhak, I mean, not Perlman, but who was –
Mrs. Silverman: We had Isaac Stern here.
Mr. Kolb: Isaac Stern – I was going to ask about Isaac Stern. Were you involved in getting him?
Mrs. Silverman: Well, I was playing in the violin section instead of the viola at that time. He went – pudgy fingers. You ask yourself how could a guy like that play so beautifully and he went to each stand – how many stands were there? Two at each stand ��� he’d come and show exactly how you wanted to do it, “bum bum” not “da da da,” “bump bum da da.” But he did it. I’ve never never forgot that.
Dr. Silverman: And this was in 1948, in a concert in the Grove Theater.
Mrs. Silverman: He came to this little town.
Dr. Silverman: He had been – the Cohn family was instrumental in helping him get his music training in San Francisco. Stern was the first American-trained big name violinist, you see.
Mrs. Silverman: But he took a picture with – who’s our dear friend? Alice Lyman.
Dr. Silverman: There’s a picture in the brochure about early music in Oak Ridge.
Mrs. Silverman: She was concert mistress at the [inaudible].
Mr. Kolb: Well there’s a picture of him up in the Children’s Museum.
Dr. Silverman: Right.
Mr. Kolb: When he was here, yeah. I think of Ed Westcott also. That was an amazing situation.
Dr. Silverman: Dot used to be at the first stand and the first violin, sitting with the concert master, until she switched to viola. In later years, for a time, she served as principal violist when Jacinta played as principal for the second violins, in order to strengthen that section.
Mrs. Silverman: I was going to say something; it went in –
Mr. Kolb: Forgot what it was.
Mrs. Silverman: It was rather important.
[break in recording]
Mrs. Silverman: How many people are you? Do you have to go to this week?
[break in recording]
Mrs. Silverman: I didn’t tell about something. I graduated – guess how old I was when I graduated high school?
Mr. Kolb: Well, I think Mike spilled the beans there. You said fourteen, right? As I recall. You were an early bloomer.
Dr. Silverman: And I graduated at fifteen, and Dot made a comment, she said, “Two smartasses met together and got married.”
Mr. Kolb: Young smart people. Well, that’s great.
Mrs. Silverman: Well, you can’t get enough praises from me for this town. When my nephew walked out that door, he said, “How can you live in a town like this?” My jaw dropped. I kissed him goodbye, “Come again.��
Dr. Silverman: We had been out to the coast. We sat in the traffic line and Dot made the comment, “There must have been an accident up front, that the lines were from.”
Mrs. Silverman: That was the day that we were in bumper to bumper traffic.
Dr. Silverman: And they told us, “No, this is everyday type of traffic on the freeways in L.A.”
Mr. Kolb: Oh, in L.A., yeah. Now it happens in Knoxville, even; the traffic backs up.
Dr. Silverman: Well, you know, in Oak Ridge between 11:00 and 1:30, it looks like a big city with the traffic down the Turnpike and Illinois.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, it’s busy, you’re right. People are out and around.
Dr. Silverman: Out for lunch and errands.
Mr. Kolb: It’s not as bad. It does move. It does get busy, you’re right. Yeah, this is a unique town and I’ve lived here now –
Mrs. Silverman: How long?
Mr. Kolb: – for fifty years.
Mrs. Silverman: Fifty years.
Mr. Kolb: Well this is the 50th year, back in 1954, yeah fifty years.
Mrs. Silverman: Well you have a few stories to tell, yourself.
Mr. Kolb: Well, yeah a little bit here and there but that’s not –
Dr. Silverman: Jim have you ever –
[end of recording]

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ORAL HISTORY OF DOROTHY SILVERMAN
With husband, Meyer D. “Mike” Silverman, Ph.D.
Interviewed by Jim Kolb
February 19, 2004
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Dorothy let’s begin by you telling us about your early work experience even before you came to Oak Ridge, okay?
Mrs. Silverman: I hope my memory will hold up. I graduated University of Louisville in – when did I graduate at the University of Louisville?
Dr. Silverman: ’33.
Mrs. Silverman: That’s what I thought, 1933. I majored in French and Spanish and I couldn’t get a job teaching. And then I realized that many Ph.D.s were in the same predicament. Somewhere along the line, I had taken a course in typing and I applied – I couldn’t get any job in Louisville. I took a civil service there and I was accepted in Washington, D.C., and I worked with the Veterans Administration there. I don’t know how many years I was there. Four years – three or four years. Then I met my husband and we got married, 1940. Mike, is that it?
Dr. Silverman: What?
Mrs. Silverman: 1940? When did we get married?
Dr. Silverman: We got married September 1st, 1940.
Mrs. Silverman: Now you come down and sit next to me.
Dr. Silverman: Okay, fine.
Mr. Kolb: That’s okay. Go ahead.
Mrs. Silverman: I have a poor memory now. While we married in 1940, he was working for the Department of Agriculture, and I was working with the Veterans Administration. And then he got a job in Edgewood Arsenal, Maryland, and I followed him there and I worked in the laboratory as a secretary to a Colonel Shannon? Was that his name?
Dr. Silverman: Whatever his name was.
Mrs. Silverman: And then my husband was called. He applied for an application up in Chicago and he was referred to a little town called Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Little town.
Mrs. Silverman: And I followed him there, and I was a secretary at the Laboratory in the Chemistry Division until the war was over. Correct?
Mr. Kolb: And that was in ’43.
Dr. Silverman: We arrived in Chicago in November ’43 and a month later came down to Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: You came to Oak Ridge in ’43, then.
Dr. Silverman: December ’43.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mrs. Silverman: When the authorities found out that he had a wife who could type, what did he say? “Don’t let this man go!”
Mr. Kolb: ‘Don’t let this man go,’ just to get the woman.
Dr. Silverman: Yeah, head of research, Director of Research, Sergeant Whitaker, who was Director of the Lab, “Don’t let this man out of your sight,” when he found out she had been secretary to two patent attorneys at RCA.
Mrs. Silverman: I forgot about that.
Mr. Kolb: So for whom did you work early on at the lab?
Mrs. Silverman: I worked for the Chemistry Division.
Mr. Kolb: Chemistry Division.
Mrs. Silverman: For – is it R. Perlman?
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mrs. Silverman: Ralph Stoughton.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, Ralph Stoughton.
Mrs. Silverman: And who was the other guy?
Dr. Silverman: Spoff English.
Mrs. Silverman: Spoff English.
Mr. Kolb: Spoff English, okay.
Mrs. Silverman: And I enjoyed that work. I felt it was essential. Actually, I was very happy to be there.
Mr. Kolb: Yes.
Mrs. Silverman: Working, feeling I was useful.
Dr. Silverman: May I add an addition? Perlman was Seaborg’s right hand man. He and Seaborg left Berkeley to start the Chemistry Division in 1942 in Chicago and Dot, as Perlman’s secretary, had thirty-eight men out of the seventy in the Chemistry Division under her.
Mr. Kolb: More than half. Wow, big job. They didn’t have many secretaries, obviously.
Dr. Silverman: Three college grads they found in Oak Ridge in the Chemistry Division.
Mr. Kolb: Is that right? Wow.
Mrs. Silverman: Well after the war, nineteen –
Mr. Kolb: Let’s stick with the war, okay, let���s stick with the wartime. So you worked –
Mrs. Silverman: While in Oak Ridge, I worked six days a week. We didn’t have much time for socializing. We joined the Jewish Congregation of Oak Ridge; it was formed.
Mr. Kolb: When was that formed by the way?
Dr. Silverman: The congregation?
Mr. Kolb: Approximately.
Dr. Silverman: I don’t know. There was a pseudo congregation during the war led by a Captain Bernstein, but it wasn’t a formal congregation. I don’t know that one actually was formed till after the war. But it used the Chapel on the Hill just like every other denomination.
Mr. Kolb: Right.
Mrs. Silverman: It was interesting because each denomination brought its relics or religious objects for use and then they’d remove them and the next religion would come in the same place, the Chapel on the Hill, and take prayer; it was interesting. Working six days a week didn’t leave much time for socializing. That time – during that time – no, the orchestra wasn’t formed then. Go ahead. What was your question?
Mr. Kolb: Well I was going to ask you about the orchestra, because you were active in that, I know, early on.
Mrs. Silverman: Very [early] on. I left the lab nineteen-forty-what? Stopped working for Perlman in what? What year?
Dr. Silverman: 1943.
Mrs. Silverman: 1943, and I felt that I was finished with work. Then I was asked by a man by the name of Waldo Cohn, who was a cellist, to work for him. And in that office we formed the Symphony. Actually, I was his ���man Friday,’ and we did all, everything that pertained, calling and –
Mr. Kolb: Contacting other musicians.
Mrs. Silverman: Contacting and I have something I wrote in the newspaper, a nice clipping about him. Waldo did everything. He was a custodian. He swept the floors, moved the piano. He called his personnel man – in the orchestra – I get started on the orchestra because that’s my baby.
Mr. Kolb: That’s okay.
Mrs. Silverman: And we had both worked very hard with that. He was a librarian, he ordered music; he was everything that you have in a board.
Mr. Kolb: Yes, yes you didn’t have a board back then.
Mrs. Silverman: We did not have a board.
Mr. Kolb: Where did you practice?
Mrs. Silverman: In high school, initially, right?
Dr. Silverman: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: In the high school?
Dr. Silverman: Yeah, the old Jefferson, used to be on top of the hill, and then later it was named – it temporarily was the high school, too, until we built the new high school in ’51.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, okay, so in the original high school, okay. And how many people were involved in the early orchestra approximately?
Mrs. Silverman: We gave our first concert – [to her husband] now come on, I have days; I need you here.
Dr. Silverman: All right, a string symphonette grew out of quartets that Waldo used to hold at his house.
Mrs. Silverman: Quartets, trios, and so on.
Dr. Silverman: The first string symphonette consisted of nineteen players, gave its concert in June of ’44. Later that year, Waldo got the members of the band, Oak Ridge Community Band, wind players who were working under John Van Wazer, who had a wind ensemble, and the combination of the strings, wind ensemble and the brass from the band formed the Oak Ridge Symphony which gave its first concert in November of ’44. So we have been operating – this is our 60th year.
Mr. Kolb: Right and I think we got a picture of Waldo directing one of the early symphony – I don’t know which day it was – and I took it and had it mounted in the Welcome Center of Oak Ridge after he passed away. You helped us get that. But that was an early picture that early photographer –
Mrs. Silverman: Westcott?
Mr. Kolb: Westcott, Ed Westcott took, yes.
Mrs. Silverman: Ed Westcott – we bumped into him two weeks ago, I guess, a week ago.
Dr. Silverman: At Shoney’s, yes.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, okay, yeah.
Mrs. Silverman: He�����s still living.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, yes.
Dr. Silverman: Ed had had a stroke.
Mr. Kolb: He’s had a stroke, but he’s recovering.
Mrs. Silverman: As a matter of fact, I did everything [for Waldo Cohn]. I worked in his office. I was his secretary, and the radio isotopes, actually, first shipment of radio isotopes came out of his office. And we worked – you say somebody came in the office and said, “How do they do all this?” We had the Oak Ridge Scientific, was it? Or what was I – come on.
Dr. Silverman: Dot was secretary to the Oak Ridge Symphony. The first secretary when ORCMA was formed in 1947, she – Association of Oak Ridge Scientists and Engineers was formed to lobby – which lobbied for the Atomic Energy Commission to take –
Mr. Kolb: And she was secretary of that, too?
Dr. Silverman: She was secretary of that, too. When John Swartout and I moved into that office after Waldo went to the Biology Division, he looked at all them niches. I was doing my thesis under John Swartout, and he looked and he said, “My God, what weren’t these two up to? They did so many things.”
Mrs. Silverman: He was a hard worker. He just heard there’s going to be a big concert coming up –
Mr. Kolb: In April? The National Symphony?
Mrs. Silverman: Yes. You were aware of that.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I read about it.
Mrs. Silverman: I hope you can come.
Mr. Kolb: We’re planning on it.
Mrs. Silverman: And I think he will be honored at that time.
Mr. Kolb: Good.
Mrs. Silverman: I hope.
Mr. Kolb: Good. So you were secretary; every time you turned around, you were secretary for some organization.
Mrs. Silverman: When I retired, I said – I acted all – I had a degree for teaching, you know, so I said, “I don’t want to see another typewriter as long as I live. I won’t have it in the house.” So we – am I talking too much?
Mr. Kolb: No, you’re fine. Keep going.
Mrs. Silverman: At that time, after the war, there was a resurgence of interest in foreign languages. All our children must have this education, because it’s just the thing. So I said, oh boy, this is a good chance to get back in my language field, in my field.
Mr. Kolb: Yes.
Mrs. Silverman: So I was then asked if I would help to form this, and then I’d say, “I found I can’t do it. I’ve forgotten everything I knew,” and, you know, if you don’t use a language – well, they didn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. So several teachers and I got the foreign language – elementary school – into the program. First year we worked for nothing all year.
Mr. Kolb: Just volunteers?
Mrs. Silverman: Volunteers. In the early days, everything was volunteer.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right.
Mrs. Silverman: Volunteerism, and we finally got the program into the school system, and went to junior high, and I started off using that oral program in the high school. But that time, it had lost its – they’d lost interest in that and they lost interest in the oral part of teaching the program, really. So then you had your formal Latin, French, Spanish, the way it’s been, you know, for years.
Mr. Kolb: So you taught all those languages or just –
Mrs. Silverman: I just taught French and Spanish.
Mr. Kolb: French and Spanish, okay, yeah.
Mrs. Silverman: Then we had our little daughter, Roberta Silverman.
Mr. Kolb: Let’s go back. Who else was involved in that, in that early language –
Mrs. Silverman: It was Irene Campbell, it was Adelaide –
Dr. Silverman: Adelaide Bernstein, called them the three old musketeers. They were hired.
Mr. Kolb: I see.
Mrs. Silverman: We were fully hired. We volunteered for a whole year. It was hard work, preparing. We had no materials, and we did finally receive some materials. There was others. Bernice Lawson did the French, a few others.
Mr. Kolb: Bernice Lawson, yes, George Lawson’s wife?
Mrs. Silverman: Yes. I have forgotten their names.
Mr. Kolb: That’s fine.
Mrs. Silverman: There’s a lot of interest in that program.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, yeah. Well, let’s go back to the World War II period again. You said you were very busy working, of course, but you had –
Mrs. Silverman: I had the Symphony and tennis. We formed a –
Mr. Kolb: Oh tennis, okay, you and Mike and –
Mrs. Silverman: Oh, no, the Women’s League would – we were jealous of the men.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mrs. Silverman: So we had to have a Women’s League. There’s a picture of it in the ORNL paper. You don’t have that, do you?
Dr. Silverman: Somewhere I’ve got it in the files.
Mrs. Silverman: Of the women’s tennis team.
Mr. Kolb: Who else was on that here, involved in that?
Mrs. Silverman: He remembers.
Dr. Silverman: Let’s see –
Mrs. Silverman: Ella Lane.
Mr. Kolb: Ella Lane, Jim Lane’s wife?
Mrs. Silverman: Jim Lane’s.
Dr. Silverman: Henry Zeldes’ wife, Ann Flynn was her name, her maiden name. Whyte Gaither. Whyte, she used to work in the – in Medical Division.
Mr. Kolb: What year was this about? Still during the war?
Dr. Silverman: It started after the war.
Mr. Kolb: After the war?
Mrs. Silverman: The ladies League started after the war. The Men’s League started during the war.
Mr. Kolb: During the war, yeah, right, okay.
Mrs. Silverman: We had a sixty year –
Mr. Kolb: Anniversary?
Mrs. Silverman: Anniversary, remember, at the lab? Was it sixty years?
Dr. Silverman: Well we would, yeah the 60th year of the lab, they held a meeting.
Mrs. Silverman: I think I was the last surviving woman.
Dr. Silverman: She may be.
Mrs. Silverman: I was interviewed.
Dr. Silverman: Marilyn McLaughlin.
Mr. Kolb: Yes.
Dr. Silverman: We had a fifteen minute interview, and then we got fifteen seconds on the TV program that night.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, is that right?
Dr. Silverman: Alvin [Weinberg] got thirty seconds!
Mr. Kolb: Well, yeah, they always shorten it.
Dr. Silverman: Sound bites.
Mrs. Silverman: But the formation of the Symphony and the music has been my first love.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I bet and very successful.
Mrs. Silverman: It’s still holding up and I was a charter member of the Oak Ridge Civic Music Association, as such. I was on the first board. And, of course, guess who was secretary?
Mr. Kolb: Somebody named Dot.
Mrs. Silverman: Somebody named Dot.
Mr. Kolb: Wonderful.
Mrs. Silverman: And I worked at the – yeah, well, I enjoyed music. I taught a little bit at the same time.
Mr. Kolb: And you played in the orchestra too?
Mrs. Silverman: Oh yes, I played violin. Then I switched to viola.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, but Mike played the violin all time.
Dr. Silverman: Yeah. Dot played for fifty-one years until her eyes acted up.
Mrs. Silverman: Yeah, I’ve not played anymore. Mike, I forgot to say that I found an old, old program. It was the Louisville Philharmonic. It was the first year, and I left – and why did keep that piece of paper? Well, I saw my name on there, so you might say I was a member of the first Louisville Philharmonic when it first began.
Mr. Kolb: Really?
Mrs. Silverman: But I don’t recall playing with them. I don’t know, my name is there on the program, but everywhere I went, we’ve moved, whatever, I’ve managed to find a symphony where I could play. Washington, D.C., and –
Mr. Kolb: Wonderful.
Mrs. Silverman: Despite a handicap – I’ve always had this. I graduated high school at the age of what, Mike, fourteen?
Dr. Silverman: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Wow, my goodness.
Mrs. Silverman: At the time of graduation, just before graduation, I had an infection, and this finger was gone. I thought that was the end of my music, but nothing was going to keep me away from that.
Mr. Kolb: You kept going.
Mrs. Silverman: I kept going.
Mr. Kolb: With the rest of your fingers.
Mrs. Silverman: I never had a good vibrato, but I kept going.
Mr. Kolb: Good. That’s amazing.
Mrs. Silverman: What else Mike? [to her husband] What are you reading there? Help me out! [to the interviewer] Tell me your question, then.
Mr. Kolb: Did you participate in any other – I know you’re busy with all the music activity, but any other, like the tennis court dances and things of that nature during the war?
Mrs. Silverman: We attended one or two, right?
Dr. Silverman: Yeah.
Mrs. Silverman: Ed Pollock?
Dr. Silverman: Bill Pollock.
Mrs. Silverman: Got on the tennis court? Bill Pollock, Bill Pollock. I was a member of – [to her husband] where are those pic – there you are. Let me have those things over here. [to the interviewer] Oak Ridge Civic Music Association Guild, we still are active members, we – a program chairman of that for years. [to her husband] Let me have those things. That will remind me. What’s that?
Dr. Silverman: This plaque was given, Jim, and Dot was selected as one of ten women in Oak Ridge and down at the bottom, that last paragraph, you’ll see, they go over her dossier and, turn over –
Mr. Kolb: This was by the Association of University Women, right?
Dr. Silverman: Right.
Mrs. Silverman: Yeah, right.
Mr. Kolb: AA –
Mrs. Silverman: – UW.
Mr. Kolb: UW, right. Yeah, well, it’s an impressive dossier, as you say, all the symphonies she belonged to and people she worked with and for, my goodness.
Mrs. Silverman: I didn’t tell – in the war, I played with Washington Civic Symphony too. Wherever I went, I managed to find an orchestra. I was born in Bellingham, Washington. Did I tell you?
Mr. Kolb: Oh you were?
Mrs. Silverman: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: No. Way out near Seattle?
Mrs. Silverman: My father had pulpits in, oh, well, El Paso, Texas, Tucson, Arizona. I feel that I was –
Mr. Kolb: You traveled widely as a child, too, you didn’t –
Mrs. Silverman: Minister’s kids, I was pretty good, though, for a minister’s kid. I was too busy.
Mr. Kolb: They always have a reputation of being wild but I don’t know why that is – because they’ve been so repressed by their parents.
Mrs. Silverman: They were very proud of me; they did me a justice. Anyway, I had three brothers. One was in business; another was an attorney in Louisville, Kentucky. He was made a Colonel by – what’s his name?
Dr. Silverman: Happy Chandler.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, an honorary Colonel of Kentucky?
Mrs. Silverman: Yes, Herman Cohen, C-O-H-E-N, and then my younger brother was a pediatrician and he served in World War I and so he was –
Dr. Silverman: He was a flight surgeon.
Mrs. Silverman: Flight surgeon.
Dr. Silverman: They serviced the Southeast Pacific.
Mrs. Silverman: He was deaf as a result of being up in the – but his wife was his ears, and that kept him in active practice.
Mr. Kolb: Good.
Mrs. Silverman: What else, dear boy?
Mr. Kolb: Well, let’s go back to the wartime. Did the fact that you lived in a secret city behind fences bother you or what did you –
Mrs. Silverman: No, I was proud.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, you were proud.
Mrs. Silverman: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mrs. Silverman: I was very proud of what we were doing. Really I’m against war, but I was very proud of what we were doing. His folks live up in Connecticut and we go drive up there, over twelve hours to get up there and, “What are you doing down there in the sticks?”
Mr. Kolb: Tennessee, yeah.
Mrs. Silverman: “We can’t tell you. After the war’s over, we’ll tell you.” And we were on our way back one year, and the bomb was dropped. Remember that phone – you went to the phone, made a call to your folks and told them, “Now you know what” –
Mr. Kolb: Oh, I see.
Dr. Silverman: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: After the first bomb was dropped?
Dr. Silverman: Yeah, the announcement came over the radio. I said to my mother, “Now you know why we’re down there in Tennessee.” The following day, driving back to Oak Ridge from New York, we stopped outside of Washington and picked up the Washington Post, and there was the big headline.
Mr. Kolb: Saying ‘Atomic Bomb’?
Dr. Silverman: “Atomic bomb dropped on Japan,” first one.
Mr. Kolb: Where were you when you first heard the news, Mrs. Silverman. Were you at work?
Mrs. Silverman: In a car, we were driving back to – we were on vacation, weren’t we?
Dr. Silverman: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: Oh you heard it on the radio?
Mrs. Silverman: Yeah.
Dr. Silverman: Right.
Mr. Kolb: You weren’t here, you were actually traveling.
Mrs. Silverman: Returning.
Dr. Silverman: We were in New York at the time.
Mr. Kolb: I see, okay.
Mrs. Silverman: It wasn’t New York. We were there in Connecticut.
Dr. Silverman: No, no, at that time my mother was in New York for a couple of years. My dad had taken a position in New York.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mrs. Silverman: Okay.
Mr. Kolb: So you heard on the radio, all this?
Dr. Silverman: Right.
Mr. Kolb: Well, that��s interesting. So you didn’t get –
Mrs. Silverman: It was a well-kept secret, no doubt about it.
Mr. Kolb: Did you know about the secret service being around and prowling around in – ear to the ground?
Mrs. Silverman: No, we never heard of that. We were too busy to pay attention to that. Oh, I’ll tell you something very funny.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mrs. Silverman: [to her husband] You help me out on this.
Dr. Silverman: Okay.
Mrs. Silverman: This was on a Saturday; I think it was. The World Series was on. I was typing furiously. This was during the war, with one report after another chasing around. Cas Borkowsky – was head of the Instrument Division – had some boys of his come down and fit me up with earplugs and a radio. This was Saturday, the World Series is on, and I’m typing furiously to get one report out after another, and the phone would ring, SCORE! – And who was that? I don’t know who – hadn’t the slightest idea who was – you know who was playing?
Dr. Silverman: Who was playing then?
Mrs. Silverman: Yeah.
Mr. Kolb: So they called up on the phone to ask you the score?
Mrs. Silverman: Ah, that’s just full of – and I didn’t know one thing from another about baseball, but that was morale, you know.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, sure, contact with –
Mrs. Silverman: I thought that was part of my duty to keep the boys happy.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, my goodness.
Dr. Silverman: The radio was up in the attic, and the wires led down to her office.
Mr. Kolb: My goodness.
Mrs. Silverman: That’s the way the score is –
Dr. Silverman: Cas had a bunch of crackerjacks.
Mr. Kolb: Was it not legal to have a radio in the lab at that time?
Dr. Silverman: I don’t know.
Mr. Kolb: Because I don’t recall. Well it’s –
Mrs. Silverman: Well, Cas is not living anymore.
Mr. Kolb: No, that’s right.
Mrs. Silverman: Dandl, he’s out in California.
Mr. Kolb: Oh yeah, Ray Dandl?
Dr. Silverman: Ray Dandl, [inaudible] was in it, in the SED at that time; he worked in that group. Let���s see, trying to think of –
Mr. Kolb: I’m sure you had lots of interesting anecdotes to tell about the lives of all these people that you interacted with.
Mrs. Silverman: Oh, yes. Oh, the parties we gave. We were married when we arrived in Oak Ridge, so we had picked the furniture, some furniture from Edgewood Arsenal, remember? And we had a grand piano didn’t we?
Dr. Silverman: No, we didn’t get that until after the war, in Louisville.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Dr. Silverman: We had the –
Mrs. Silverman: No, wait a minute – we gave parties with piano; Alvin Weinberg came over and played on the piano.
Dr. Silverman: Well, that was after the war.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Dr. Silverman: We were in an “A” house on Kingfisher Lane, and we were one of the few people who had good furniture, which we had purchased while we were working at Edgewood Arsenal, and we had that furniture delivered to Oak Ridge when we came down from Chicago. I also had a B ration card because I had been working for the Permutit Water Conditioning Corporation in southern New Jersey and had to travel twenty-five miles to work and was working on a couple of important war projects.
Mr. Kolb: So you had a better than average gasoline ration card.
Dr. Silverman: Right. That ration card helped us go back and forth for the first three months from Knoxville to Oak Ridge until we obtained permanent housing in Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, before you lived in Oak Ridge, I see.
Dr. Silverman: And it also enabled us to take three or four single men with us on Monday nights into Knoxville to shop at Millers and get a good meal.
Mrs. Silverman: You’ve heard the word ‘pukatorium’?
Mr. Kolb: No, I haven’t.
Dr. Silverman: That was the nickname for the Central Cafeteria on –
Mr. Kolb: What do you call it?
Dr. Silverman: The pukatorium.
Mr. Kolb: The pukatorium, oh, wow, that’s pretty gross.
Dr. Silverman: Yeah.
Mrs. Silverman: That was one of the names for the place.
Mr. Kolb: It was the mass production –
Dr. Silverman: It was the cafeteria on Central Avenue, near Jackson Square.
Mrs. Silverman: We were glad to have it though, Mike, don’t forget that.
Mr. Kolb: Well, talking about Knoxville, were you treated okay by these merchants there and when you shopped?
Dr. Silverman: Well we were foreigners as they’d say.
Mr. Kolb: But let her tell it. Yeah, go ahead. What do you think, Dot?
Mrs. Silverman: We didn’t spend too much time there, but I did feel that they didn’t know what we were doing there and why and what for. I didn’t understand some of the language, the ‘poke,’ “Do you want a poke?”
Mr. Kolb: Oh, I see, the language.
Mrs. Silverman: A few little things like that. We were too busy, really, to – they did resent that. You had a feeling that we shouldn’t be there. I mean, what are we doing? We couldn’t say why we were there.
Mr. Kolb: Exactly. But they liked your money, I assume.
Mrs. Silverman: Absolutely. But it was a great experience. I wouldn’t – it was a great experience of our lives. I mean, you felt it was worthwhile.
Mr. Kolb: Oh yeah, even though it was wartime as you say, it was kind of a negative thing, but yet it turned out to be a positive thing.
Mrs. Silverman: Do you have that book, Mike? Seaborg?
Dr. Silverman: Yeah.
Mrs. Silverman: I feel very honored. I’m going to tell this story. Mike and I were having supper, I guess it was, I was across this kitchen there, talking, busy, and the phone rang and I [phone rings] – like this, see?
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: A resolution by the House of Representatives of the State, honoring you, Mrs. Silverman, and Waldo Cohn and Jacinta Howard?
Mrs. Silverman: Weren’t you on this thing, Mike?
Mr. Kolb: And Meyer, yeah, Mike or Meyer, as you were formerly called, Silverman, back – this was done in –
Dr. Silverman: 1994.
Mr. Kolb: 1994.
Dr. Silverman: At the 50th anniversary of the formation of the Symphony.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, I see, that’s right. This is on January 29th of 1994, Orchestra’s Founders Day, wonderful. Jimmy Nassif. He’s still – I think he’s still in the House. Or if he’s not, he had been till recently.
Dr. Silverman: McNally is still in the Senate.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, Ned McWherter was Governor.
Mrs. Silverman: Yeah.
Dr. Silverman: And, of course, Dave Coffey –
Mr. Kolb: Dave Coffey was –
Dr. Silverman: Retired from the – he didn’t run again.
Mr. Kolb: Right, well, you worked hard and you did have some recognition.
Dr. Silverman: Yes, we did.
Mr. Kolb: Maybe late, but at least it had happened.
Mrs. Silverman: One night we were having supper, in the kitchen –
Mr. Kolb: That’s right. You were talking about that.
Mrs. Silverman: And the phone rang, and I recognized – he said, “This is Glenn Seaborg.”
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my goodness.
Mrs. Silverman: I said, “Who?” I was going to give him a wisecrack, you know, something like, “Well this is Hillary Clinton,” but then I thought twice. I said, “Oh, you want to speak to Mike Silverman.” And I quickly handed the phone to Mike, Meyer, and he said, “Oh, no, no,” “Who you talking to?”
Dr. Silverman: Yeah, “I want to speak to Dorothy.”
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mrs. Silverman: So, he wanted something in my background. Like he wanted a little of that and he wanted it for his book. Are you aware of this book of his?
Mr. Kolb: Yes.
Dr. Silverman: The Plutonium Story, the journals from ’39, the discovery of Plutonium till 1946 when he and Pullman went back to Berkeley to teach again and do research, and her bio is in here as a secretary to –
Mrs. Silverman: This is a very distinguished bio, but he wanted it.
Dr. Silverman: You know, educated, born, so and so, was educated at the University of Louisville, a B.A. in Spanish and French.
Mrs. Silverman: Well show it to him, Honey, he might pick up a few things that you’re not –
Dr. Silverman: Well, it’s just – here, right at the top –
Mrs. Silverman: Up there somewhere. I can’t read anymore. My eye – I have macular [degeneration].
Mr. Kolb: So this was during the war that he called you, I take it.
Dr. Silverman: No, no. This was in the mid ’90s.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, when he was writing his –
Dr. Silverman: Yeah, this book came out about – oh, I don’t know, about six or seven years ago.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, it was much later, right.
Mrs. Silverman: But I didn’t think he even knew I existed. Apparently –
Mr. Kolb: Well, he obviously did.
Mrs. Silverman: Obviously he did.
Mr. Kolb: He remembered your importance, that’s right. That’s wonderful.
Mrs. Silverman: Yeah, I’m honored. I’m really honored.
Dr. Silverman: See, on the left, Jim, is the organization of Perlman’s section, you see. Seaborg has in that book everybody he came into contact with on the project that was in any way connected with the work there that he had anything to do with and there��s a bio of every one of the so called “wheels” on the project, with the discussions of meetings that were held with family, tell them what to do after the war, so forth. So that’s – you see, that’s about a thousand page book and I went back and learned a lot of actinide chemistry as a result of reading that.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I bet, because he didn’t leave anything out, did he.
Mrs. Silverman: Were you a chemist or what?
Mr. Kolb: No, I was an engineer. Right. Worked with chemists.
Mrs. Silverman: You knew Jacinta Howard, or your mother?
Mr. Kolb: Well, my mother, yeah. I mean, I met her through my parents who lived in the same Garden Apartments.
Mrs. Silverman: Wonderful gal.
Mr. Kolb: Back in the ’80’s, yes.
Mrs. Silverman: We miss her. Her son, by the way, Tom – I better check on those fiddles.
Dr. Silverman: Oh yeah, her son, Tom, teaches at Savannah College.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Dr. Silverman: And so he was here when Jacinta passed away a year and a half ago. We participated in the service.
Mrs. Silverman: Is this being recorded?
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, it’s okay, that’s fine. Well, another honor. That’s great. Dr. Seaborg was – had a good memory and was smart enough to talk to the people that were really [inaudible].
Mrs. Silverman: He was little, or small as I was. I felt I was very honored.
Mr. Kolb: Why certainly. You know, I had many secretaries in my work experience, and they were really workhorses back before you got computers and did a lot of your own writing.
Mrs. Silverman: That’s right.
Mr. Kolb: And they were the key, the hub of the offices you might say, because if anything went wrong, your secretary always had to take the brunt for it, because they were involved in everything, you know.
Dr. Silverman: Well, Jim, to tell about the reasons that Seaborg would come down to Oak Ridge every month, sometimes more often during the processing stage when Clinton Labs was developing the plutonium separation process to discuss with Perlman how they were getting along, because we were the pilot plant for Hanford, and Dot would see Seaborg, six-foot-six, and Perlman, five-foot-four, walking down the hall together, and see, Ward would stop at the office and see her and so he was well acquainted with Dot.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah another eminent scientist of that era from the Met [Metallurgical] Lab in Chicago was Dr. Arthur Compton.
Mrs. Silverman: Oh, yes.
Mr. Kolb: Did you have any interaction with him? Of course, he was on the physics side.
Mrs. Silverman: No, no I didn’t.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mrs. Silverman: But Alvin Weinberg has been a good close friend of ours, so he’s the physics side.
Mr. Kolb: But Compton and his wife lived here for a while.
Dr. Silverman: Oh, yes.
Mr. Kolb: They had a temporary home because his primary residence was – I guess, was up in the Chicago area.
Dr. Silverman: Oh yes, and they were under pseudo names.
Mr. Kolb: Is that right?
Dr. Silverman: Oh yes.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Dr. Silverman: Their names were disguised.
Mr. Kolb: I see. I didn’t know that.
Dr. Silverman: And when there was a reception or party at the Ridge Rec Hall, nothing but the best brands of liquor were out there. Whereas we lowly civilians were told to avoid trying to bring anything into the area.
Mr. Kolb: Now let���s talk about that a little bit. That is a really another novel part of Oak Ridge, the dry county and how liquor was brought in.
Mrs. Silverman: Well one of the officers – you have this down – my brother was an attorney up in Louisville, Kentucky and that’s close by, but at that time, it took about seven or eight hours to drive. Today you’d do it in, what, four hours? Before we left, he had a few bottles to give us, choice Kentucky Bourbon, and how were we going to get it through the lines? Well, one time, I don’t remember all that stuff, I had a box of Kotex. We hid it in there. Very, very –
Dr. Silverman: Hid it in a sack of potatoes.
Mr. Kolb: Smuggled it in through –
Dr. Silverman: Oh, the ultimate, though, was when we didn’t drive up but took the train to Louisville, came back – you had to make arrangements beforehand to make sure that there was to be a stop at Edgemoor or Elza Gate on the L&N. The spur went to Louisville, the main line came down from Cincinnati, and we had notified them ahead of time when we bought our tickets that we were required to stop at Edgemoor. On the train were several officers, and we overheard them speaking and they were talking about how were they were going to get the train stopped. They spoke to the conductor and we overheard the conversation. He said, “Do you have any advance notification or did you make arrangements?” They said, “No.” “Well then I can’t stop the train for you.” And then along come these two civilians who get the train stopped at Edgemoor. When we made the stop and got off, the officers asked, “How are you going to get into Oak Ridge?” We remarked, “There’s a bus that comes by every thirty minutes from Knoxville and will take us into Oak Ridge,����� and they said, “Don’t you worry.” Army car came and took us, liquor and all, right up to our doorstep on Kingfisher Lane.
Mr. Kolb: So you were the ones that got the train stopped?
Dr. Silverman: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: Okay, so how did you arrange that?
Dr. Silverman: We notified the office at the L&N when we bought our tickets. You had to notify them ahead of time that you were going to get off at this place.
Mr. Kolb: Normally didn’t stop there?
Dr. Silverman: Normally it didn’t stop, you see.
Mr. Kolb: I see. Okay.
Mrs. Silverman: Speaking of Louisville, Kentucky, we went to the Kentucky Derby and [there were] signs all around: watch your wallet. So I kept reminding him, very knowingly, “Where’s your wallet? Watch your wallet.” By the time we were due to leave and return, guess whose wallet was taken.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, no, yours?
Mrs. Silverman: Mine.
Dr. Silverman: Yeah, she lost her badge.
Mrs. Silverman: I had everything in it.
Dr. Silverman: And we got a lecture from Lowery Rearden, Head of Security.
Mrs. Silverman: Well, anyway, how did I get by? I don’t know.
Mr. Kolb: Was this during the war or after?
Dr. Silverman: During the war, this was in – a Kentucky Derby, Spring of ’45.
Mrs. Silverman: How did I get by?
Dr. Silverman: Well, when we got to the lab, I had a badge and –
Mrs. Silverman: Whatever.
Mr. Kolb: But it was temporary. I’m sure you’re not the first person to lose your badge or misplace it, but, you know, it was not desired.
Dr. Silverman: And there was Bill Knox. We’d see him in the cafeteria line, and in his hip pocket was a bottle of Retonga cough syrup, because it was almost like fifty percent alcohol.
Mrs. Silverman: I mean, we’d go to parties at the Ridge Hall, and I’d be talking, I’d have a glass out there, and every time I took a sip, it was filled to the top. I mean, it was flowing.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, the people knew how to get it, and, of course, bootlegging was going on.
Dr. Silverman: Oh, yes, white lighting.
Mr. Kolb: And I guess there was a source just not very far out of Oak Ridge in Roane County?
Dr. Silverman: Oh, in Morgan County, The Owl was right on the borderline between Roane and Morgan County.
Mr. Kolb: I see, was it in Morgan County though?
Dr. Silverman: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: And that was wet?
Dr. Silverman: That was wet.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, okay, and people went there?
Dr. Silverman: That’s unusual.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I didn’t know that. It wasn’t that far away, then, that you could go to that place.
Mrs. Silverman: So you were born where, Wisconsin?
[break in recording]
Mr. Kolb: Okay, Dot, go ahead.
Mrs. Silverman: We are on what, eighty-nine. In June, I will be ninety, if I live that long. But we are very active. We belong in clubs. And we go – “Are you ever home?” “No.” We’re at a meeting or we’re attending classes at Roane State.
Mr. Kolb: ORICL.
Mrs. Silverman: ORICL, and we keep very busy. He plays in two symphony orchestras. He is on the board. I mean it’s great, isn’t it, for a small town, you know.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, right, small city.
Mrs. Silverman: Small city. We know a lot of people. You can just walk along the street there and “Hi Joe,” “Hi Dot,” and do whatever. It’s a feeling you don’t get in a big city. So when my nephew said, “How can you stand a small town?” I could not even begin to tell him. I love every minute I was here.
Mr. Kolb: And you still do.
Mrs. Silverman: And I still do. I love the people. [referring to something outside] In the front, in the woods, look out there. You know what you pay for a view like this up in New York or somewhere?
Mr. Kolb: It doesn’t exist.
Mrs. Silverman: It doesn’t exist.
Mr. Kolb: You gotta go up in the Poconos or whatever.
Mrs. Silverman: We have it right here, and, you know, we’re not wealthy, just like any scientist, but we have the wealth. I mean, we just love it here. We have friends, people.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, Oak Ridgers don’t leave very much, do they? They retire and they stick around, pretty much.
Mrs. Silverman: We know what we have.
Dr. Silverman: What we have, Jim, are snowbirds. We can see it in the membership of the ORCMA members, who are gone for a couple months during the winter to Florida, to Arizona and then –
Mr. Kolb: But they’re still Oak Ridgers, I mean –
Dr. Silverman: Oh, yeah.
Mr. Kolb: – for a time, yeah.
Dr. Silverman: Yeah, June Adamson wrote something that I think could be said, “In another incarnation, Dorothy Silverman would undoubtedly be producing major musical events in a large city. Fortunately, Oak Ridgers had the benefit of her talent with a whole half century of its existence, albeit she has never received deserved recognition. And members of the ORCMA guild, as it is informally known, agreed unanimously that she is its first, most worthy contributor, not only towards purposes of programming but to the planning of musical events for all of Oak Ridge from 1943 to 1993. Therefore, she is a person nominated for the prestigious AAUW Woman of Impact Award.”
Mr. Kolb: And she got it.
Mrs. Silverman: Thank you, Honey.
Mr. Kolb: Wonderful. Let me ask, speaking of music, did you participate at all in the Playhouse musicals?
Mrs. Silverman: No.
Mr. Kolb: Okay.
Mrs. Silverman: They were very busy with that.
Mr. Kolb: Did you attend the Playhouse?
Mrs. Silverman: Oh, yes. Certainly they needed – any cultural organization, we’re right there. I ran the Coffee Concerts on a Sunday night. Do you know what those are?
Mr. Kolb: Oh, sure.
Mrs. Silverman: You didn’t have to pay any money, just go there and relax for a couple of hours Sunday evening and meet people, socialize. Well anyway, that says it all; I was just active in anything musical, and I was there.
Mr. Kolb: Did your daughter begrudge the time that you were spending in all these organizations?
Mrs. Silverman: That’s another story. She played cello, and she’s now married, lovely girl. And she played in that Nashville Symphony for about, what, eight years?
Dr. Silverman: Right.
Mrs. Silverman: She has five boys, and her husband’s an architect, Alex. Her name is – Bobbie, we call her, Roberta Limor, L-I-M-O-R, and they’re in Nashville. We see them frequently.
Mr. Kolb: That’s good
[Side B]
Dr. Silverman: What month was it? Because –
Mr. Kolb: I don’t know.
Dr. Silverman: Because we were driving out west.
Mrs. Silverman: No, I wasn’t. I knew about – but I was too busy with something or other.
Mr. Kolb: I understand there was a referendum taken before that and the locals turned it down; they didn’t want the gates to be opened and the fences to be taken down.
Dr. Silverman: Could be.
Mr. Kolb: Initially.
Dr. Silverman: I vaguely remember something like that.
Mrs. Silverman: I wasn’t political in that sense of the word – League of Women Voters – but I was too busy to –
Mr. Kolb: Well, you belonged to the League of Women Voters too, way back then?
Mrs. Silverman: Way back.
Mr. Kolb: Well that was a unique experience of this town wanting to keep its, not secretness, but kind of isolation.
Mrs. Silverman: We still feel that way. Do you know, have you encountered people – we like to keep our town this size.
Mr. Kolb: Oh yeah, sure.
Mrs. Silverman: But, you know, it has to have money to exist.
Mr. Kolb: I was told by somebody that one of the reasons that the Knoxvillians didn’t like us was because we had to have our own Symphony. We had to have our own Playhouse. Why didn’t we come over there and use theirs?
Mrs. Silverman: Well we do go there, too.
Mr. Kolb: Well, I mean early on. Why did we start our own? Why didn’t we just come over there? They kind of were jealous of the fact we had our own, you know, that was part of the –
Dr. Silverman: But actually, after the war when Van Vactor came to University of Tennessee to start a fine arts program, UT did not have a music program –
Mr. Kolb: Oh, they didn’t have it?
Dr. Silverman: Nor an arts program, no, and so Dave, as the conductor of the Knoxville Symphony, reorganized it, and not having enough musicians for a full symphony, combined with Oak Ridge, the best musicians from Oak Ridge, and for four or five years, one concert was performed in Oak Ridge, the following night in Knoxville, by combining both orchestras.
Mr. Kolb: I see.
Dr. Silverman: You see?
Mr. Kolb: So they pooled the talent.
Dr. Silverman: Right, until UT started building up its music department and getting more musicians.
Mrs. Silverman: Right at this point, Oak Ridge Symphony is having a bit of problems. It’s lost a lot of members and –
Mr. Kolb: What era are we talking about? Is this after the war?
Mrs. Silverman: Now. We’re talking about now.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, now, I’m sorry.
Mrs. Silverman: People don’t have jobs; people are getting old, dying away.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, okay.
Mrs. Silverman: We’re at a very low ebb right now. Hopefully, we can’t go much lower; we will start picking up somewhere.
Mr. Kolb: I wasn’t aware of that.
Dr. Silverman: Well, the orchestra is now eighty-five to ninety percent professional. Most of the musicians come in from Knoxville, which makes for a very difficult scheduling program since the KSO does a lot of series, pop series.
Mrs. Silverman: Well, that’s not the problem, Michael, we just don’t have the money anymore.
Mr. Kolb: We’re paying more – more cost to do them.
Dr. Silverman: Right. Well, we don’t have enough local musicians of the caliber to play a large symphony program.
Mr. Kolb: It’s a big change, not like it used to be.
Mrs. Silverman: The Art Center is getting along pretty well, as far as I know. The Playhouse is doing all right. We’ll pick up. I mean, we’ve had experiences, but we’ll pick up.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah.
Dr. Silverman: There was one other problem years ago when our daughter was growing up. There were a number of talented high school students who could play in the Symphony, but with the advent of the Knoxville Youth Symphony, a number of the talented Oak Ridge High School players go into Knoxville to play in the Knoxville Youth Symphony.
Mrs. Silverman: Honey, you’re going into detail.
Mr. Kolb: That’s okay go ahead.
Dr. Silverman: So we do not have that type of personnel available.
Mrs. Silverman: Do you have any suggestions? We���re open.
Mr. Kolb: I wasn’t aware of the problem until you just brought it up. I mean, it’s just something I wasn’t aware of, but I can understand that it would be a problem.
Mrs. Silverman: But that quotation you started in your – “this man who came and saw the grassroots,” what’s his name?
Dr. Silverman: In 1947, Waldo Cohn invited a man by the name of Hans Heinsheimer, who had been the director for the biggest music publishing house in Vienna in Europe. Heinsheimer later came to the United States before the Nazis could catch up with him, and he became associated with Boosey & Hawkes and G. Sherman, the best two publishing houses in the United States, and he wrote a book called, Menagerie in F Sharp. He made the statement, he wanted to come to Oak Ridge to see a town where culture came from the bottoms up, not other towns where visiting artists came in, performed, got paid, maybe a reception and disappeared with a fee, and that was all the town had, you see. And so he wanted to see a town like Oak Ridge.
Mr. Kolb: With grassroots.
Dr. Silverman: Culture.
Mr. Kolb: Culture, yeah. Well that’s been, obviously a hard thing to maintain but they had a broad base, and it still is there.
Mrs. Silverman: I’ll tell you something funny. I don’t know if you’re recording this.
Mr. Kolb: Sure.
Mrs. Silverman: I wrote a little note. I didn’t like what was written by somebody, and I was trying to bring out a point. Waldo Cohn was a custodian. He swept the floors. He moved the pianos. He dusted and he moved the chairs around – that’s ordinarily done by someone else – and he was a reviewer. On occasion, he reviewed his own programs for the paper, newspaper.
Mr. Kolb: Oh wrote the reviews, I see.
Mrs. Silverman: He was a librarian. He ordered music. He was a personnel person; he called out. Now these jobs are performed by the Board, usually, from the personnel director down. He did everything. He called and cajoled people to come to play in the Symphony. “Oh, I haven���t played in years,” “Oh, well, you can. Dust up the violin and come.” He did everything.
Dr. Silverman: And he’d wait and turn on the lights.
Mrs. Silverman: Oh, let me tell this – wait a minute, yeah. He was in the side of the stage – his wife was there, Charmian – and was sweating and all that stuff. So he finally put on his coat, tuxedo jacket, and Charmian wiped him, dusted off, combed his hair, and peaked out and see if the audience was ready, and he would draw the curtain, walk out the stage as if –
Mr. Kolb: Everything’s normal.
Mrs. Silverman: Didn’t have anything to do, and smiled and picked up his –
Mr. Kolb: Now, was he a conductor before?
Mrs. Silverman: No.
Mr. Kolb: He just sort of did it?
Dr. Silverman: No experience. He just studied scores. We were neighbors, right next door, and Charmian used to complain to Dot –
Mrs. Silverman: To me.
Dr. Silverman: – “You see more of him than I do,” because he’d come home, have dinner, and spend time studying musical scores and all.
Mrs. Silverman: He never studied a score; he was in music, you know, he studied his own cello part, so he was prepared. Oh, he was a hard worker. And if he needed somebody, like a cymbalist, and you weren’t doing anything and he knew you, he would say, “Jim I need you,” and he’d give you a bunch of cymbals. You’d tell him, “I don’t know what to do.” “I’ll cue you in.”
Mr. Kolb: He’ll teach you.
Mrs. Silverman: And when he was ready, remember? He pointed his finger, you know.
Dr. Silverman: Henri Levy.
Mrs. Silverman: And the guy froze. We just won’t forget that. It was the – we’re waiting for him.
Mr. Kolb: Cymbal crash.
Mrs. Silverman: Nothing. And this guy was head of a section, brilliant.
Mr. Kolb: Henri Levy?
Mrs. Silverman: Yeah.
Dr. Silverman: Henri, very quiet.
Mrs. Silverman: But he could show, I mean he just made you come in, and he built that thing up. He deserves every bit of credit, I think, that you can give him, and it made a great difference in this town and to us.
Mr. Kolb: Wasn’t he also on the School Board early on?
Dr. Silverman: He was on the School Board.
Mr. Kolb: And he tried to push the integration.
Dr. Silverman: And he also was on the Advisory Town Council that recommended integration of the school system when Brown v. Roote [Brown v. Board of Education] was approved by the Supreme Court.
Mr. Kolb: I thought he was involved in that, yeah.
Dr. Silverman: Yeah, and there was a recall election, but they didn’t get a two-thirds vote, and later he resigned from the town council.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah.
Mrs. Silverman: He got some threatening phone calls, Charmian told me, in the middle of the night.
Mr. Kolb: It was an interesting time, a transition of sorts, you know. It happened, but it took somebody to step out and take the lead, and he’s another leader there, yeah. So it was not a musical talent he had, but I guess he realized the importance of public education.
Dr. Silverman: Oh yeah.
Mr. Kolb: For everyone, yeah. Well as you say –
Mrs. Silverman: Yeah, I’m sorry you missed – couldn’t talk to him. He was very –
Mr. Kolb: Well, I knew of him, I didn’t know him personally, you know, I saw him in the Symphony.
Mrs. Silverman: But he was very much a part of this town, and helped make this town what it is.
Mr. Kolb: Well there are a lot of people that did.
Mrs. Silverman: This guy over here was a good tennis player. He was busy organizing teams, leagues.
Mr. Kolb: I know. I’ve interviewed him, so I know a little bit about him. Plus I played in a tennis league for many years.
Mrs. Silverman: Oh, did you, now?
Mr. Kolb: Oh, yeah, I played until 1994 when I retired.
Mrs. Silverman: Were you a good player?
Mr. Kolb: No, no, I’m just an average player.
Mrs. Silverman: Enjoyed it though.
Mr. Kolb: I’ve just enjoyed it, yeah.
[Break in tape]
Mrs. Silverman: Stimulating, wonderful experience. And always, “What are you doing down in that little ole town there?” “Can’t tell you. We can’t tell you.”
Mr. Kolb: So you have relatives, but the people that you know outside Oak Ridge do they know much about Oak Ridge now?
Mrs. Silverman: Not really, but you can’t miss the Manhattan Project. The scientists would know, but most people don’t know.
Dr. Silverman: Dot, do you remember after you got that call from Seaborg – Dot, excited, got on phone and called our daughter.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I bet.
Dr. Silverman: And she said to Bobbie, “Do you know who called me?”
Mrs. Silverman: No.
Dr. Silverman: And she said, “Seaborg.” “Glenn, who?”
Mr. Kolb: She wasn’t aware of Glenn Seaborg?
Mrs. Silverman: And I – took all of the – deflated me.
Mr. Kolb: Oh, my. Whatever happened to Perlman? He didn’t stay here did he?
Dr. Silverman: No, he went back. Oh, DuPont used him as a consultant, and so he left in early ’45 for Hanford and served as a consultant out in Hanford, of DuPont.
Mr. Kolb: Did he move out there then?
Dr. Silverman: Yes.
Mr. Kolb: I see.
Dr. Silverman: Yes, and then he went back to the project in Chicago and then in ’46, he and Seaborg went back to California, and when he left in early ’45, Spoff English – and Spoff became, later, director of research for the AEC after the war. Uniquely, Dot was a smoker at that time.
Mrs. Silverman: I caused his demise, didn’t I? I used to bring back cigarettes.
Dr. Silverman: It was Spoff who was a steady Camel smoker. We would bring back packs of Camels from Knoxville for Spoff.
Mrs. Silverman: If I knew then what we know now.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, a big transition, it’s amazing, yeah.
Mrs. Silverman: There was Harrison Brown, also was there.
Mr. Kolb: I thought cigarettes were very plentiful during the war. The Army pushed it on the servicemen, didn’t they?
Dr. Silverman: Well on its soldiers, but not to civilians.
Mr. Kolb: You had to pay, yeah.
Dr. Silverman: Usually on Sunday mornings, there was a long line extending out from the Jackson Square Pharmacy up towards the Chapel on the Hill, and when you got in line, you didn’t know what you were getting in line for. It was either cigarettes or, for the women, nylon stockings.
Mr. Kolb: I see.
Mrs. Silverman: You heard the story of the church, the little white church there at Jackson Square?
Mr. Kolb: You mean the Chapel on the Hill?
Mrs. Silverman: Chapel on the Hill. I’m sure that somebody told you.
Mr. Kolb: Go ahead.
Mrs. Silverman: Each one would bring, each religious person or whoever would bring the objects relative to their belief. You know, candles or whatever. And then they’d leave and then the other group would come in, bring in theirs. And it epitomized to me, I said, this is the way religion should be. It should bring people together under one canopy and not divided, and be so divisive. But it was a beautiful – it was like a symphony with many movements in the symphony, you know, and with this sect coming in with theirs and leaving and then the Catholic coming, the Jewish coming in, and Episcopal coming third.
Mr. Kolb: In their common meeting place.
Mrs. Silverman: Common meeting place, common – you know, we had one thing in common, was whatever.
Dr. Silverman: I don’t know when the first actual church, independent church was built –
Mrs. Silverman: Well did you know –
Dr. Silverman: – the Jewish synagogue was built in ’51.
Mrs. Silverman: Which one?
Dr. Silverman: When the first actual private church was built other than the Chapel on the Hill.
Mrs. Silverman: Which one was it?
Dr. Silverman: I don’t know.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, I don’t know either. Many churches had their 50th anniversaries years ago, so I don’t know which is the first, offhand.
Mrs. Silverman: Well, these scientists, they might not have been very, very religious but deep, deep down they were.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, a lot of people, they were; that’s for sure. Well that’s wonderful. Well, any other unique experiences you want to add to your dossier here?
Mrs. Silverman: When I was running the – I had a nice experience. I was running the musicals, small musical sessions. I brought in a boy by the name Samuel Sanders. He was how old when he came here?
Dr. Silverman: Samuel Sanders was the younger brother of a woman named Marjorie Visner. V-I-S-N-E-R. Her husband Sid worked at K-25 and then at the Lab. He was a physicist in the early ’50s. And he had been a blue baby.
Mrs. Silverman: This little boy.
Dr. Silverman: At age twelve, Dot put him on in a Coffee Concert and we packed the six hundred seat Jefferson auditorium.
Mr. Kolb: What were you playing?
Mrs. Silverman: Piano.
Dr. Silverman: Piano.
Mrs. Silverman: Played the Rachmaninoff, was it?
Dr. Silverman: No, no that was a coffee concert, later –
Mrs. Silverman: Well, anyway –
Dr. Silverman: – in 1953, the Symphony brought him back at age sixteen as a soloist to play the Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto. He had had an operation for the blue baby business. He became the most known or well-known accompanist for all the big name artists – for Itzhak Perlman, for Pinchas Zukerman, for Stern, and he died at the age of sixty out of heart trouble. He had had a heart transplant in later years, and we saw him on CBS Sunday Morning a year or so before he died.
Mrs. Silverman: I was trying to communicate with him, and I didn’t quite make it.
Mr. Kolb: He was a very successful pianist.
Dr. Silverman: Yeah, oh yes.
Mr. Kolb: You mentioned Itzhak, I mean, not Perlman, but who was –
Mrs. Silverman: We had Isaac Stern here.
Mr. Kolb: Isaac Stern – I was going to ask about Isaac Stern. Were you involved in getting him?
Mrs. Silverman: Well, I was playing in the violin section instead of the viola at that time. He went – pudgy fingers. You ask yourself how could a guy like that play so beautifully and he went to each stand – how many stands were there? Two at each stand ��� he’d come and show exactly how you wanted to do it, “bum bum” not “da da da,” “bump bum da da.” But he did it. I’ve never never forgot that.
Dr. Silverman: And this was in 1948, in a concert in the Grove Theater.
Mrs. Silverman: He came to this little town.
Dr. Silverman: He had been – the Cohn family was instrumental in helping him get his music training in San Francisco. Stern was the first American-trained big name violinist, you see.
Mrs. Silverman: But he took a picture with – who’s our dear friend? Alice Lyman.
Dr. Silverman: There’s a picture in the brochure about early music in Oak Ridge.
Mrs. Silverman: She was concert mistress at the [inaudible].
Mr. Kolb: Well there’s a picture of him up in the Children’s Museum.
Dr. Silverman: Right.
Mr. Kolb: When he was here, yeah. I think of Ed Westcott also. That was an amazing situation.
Dr. Silverman: Dot used to be at the first stand and the first violin, sitting with the concert master, until she switched to viola. In later years, for a time, she served as principal violist when Jacinta played as principal for the second violins, in order to strengthen that section.
Mrs. Silverman: I was going to say something; it went in –
Mr. Kolb: Forgot what it was.
Mrs. Silverman: It was rather important.
[break in recording]
Mrs. Silverman: How many people are you? Do you have to go to this week?
[break in recording]
Mrs. Silverman: I didn’t tell about something. I graduated – guess how old I was when I graduated high school?
Mr. Kolb: Well, I think Mike spilled the beans there. You said fourteen, right? As I recall. You were an early bloomer.
Dr. Silverman: And I graduated at fifteen, and Dot made a comment, she said, “Two smartasses met together and got married.”
Mr. Kolb: Young smart people. Well, that’s great.
Mrs. Silverman: Well, you can’t get enough praises from me for this town. When my nephew walked out that door, he said, “How can you live in a town like this?” My jaw dropped. I kissed him goodbye, “Come again.��
Dr. Silverman: We had been out to the coast. We sat in the traffic line and Dot made the comment, “There must have been an accident up front, that the lines were from.”
Mrs. Silverman: That was the day that we were in bumper to bumper traffic.
Dr. Silverman: And they told us, “No, this is everyday type of traffic on the freeways in L.A.”
Mr. Kolb: Oh, in L.A., yeah. Now it happens in Knoxville, even; the traffic backs up.
Dr. Silverman: Well, you know, in Oak Ridge between 11:00 and 1:30, it looks like a big city with the traffic down the Turnpike and Illinois.
Mr. Kolb: Yeah, it’s busy, you’re right. People are out and around.
Dr. Silverman: Out for lunch and errands.
Mr. Kolb: It’s not as bad. It does move. It does get busy, you’re right. Yeah, this is a unique town and I’ve lived here now –
Mrs. Silverman: How long?
Mr. Kolb: – for fifty years.
Mrs. Silverman: Fifty years.
Mr. Kolb: Well this is the 50th year, back in 1954, yeah fifty years.
Mrs. Silverman: Well you have a few stories to tell, yourself.
Mr. Kolb: Well, yeah a little bit here and there but that’s not –
Dr. Silverman: Jim have you ever –
[end of recording]